Earlier this week, we welcomed Helsinki-based artist and filmmaker Kush Badhwar for an eight-week residency at G.A.S. Lagos. Working across moving image, sound, and research, his multidisciplinary practice explores the effects of mega-project making on environments and social life, particularly around urban peripheries.
During his residency, Kush will focus on observing, researching and documenting the riparian zones of Lagos. He is interested in immersing himself in sites such as coasts, wetlands, creeks, ports, ‘reclaimed’ land, bridges and other dynamic spaces between land and water.
Kush's residency is realised in collaboration with the Finnish Cultural Foundation. To find out more about supporting G.A.S. Foundation, click here.
Projection-based installation beneath the placid lake, made in collaboration with Vyjayanthi Rao and exhibited at Methods of Translucence, Forum Expanded, Berlinale, 2025. Image courtesy of Leo Hugendubel.
What is the current focus of your creative practice?
I am currently exploring the intersection of cinematic thinking, artistic practice, and urban research. By working alongside megaprojects as they are being made, I am trying to test what artistic practice can do rather than what it should be, while incrementally developing counter narratives to the dominant stories that often accompany megaproject’s propositions and production
What drew you to apply for this residency and how do you think it will inform your wider practice?
Having worked in Navi Mumbai for many years, I reached a point where I began looking to other places that both intersect with and diverge from what I had come to know there, in an effort to better understand the phenomena I was engaging with. This residency offers an opportunity to continue exploring those connections through Lagos, and to see how that encounter might inform, expand, and reorient my wider practice.
Still from Badhwar’s film Blood Earth (2013).
Can you give us an insight into how you hope to use the opportunity?
I want to broaden my urban experience and further explore the terrain between sound, film and video, artistic research, and urban studies. Through the residency, I hope to spend time observing and learning from the city, and to engage closely with its different environments and communities. Just as importantly, I hope to build lasting friendships and form connections that can sustain future dialogue and collaboration.
About Kush Badhwar
Kush Badhwar works across filmmaking, artistic and urban research as ongoing processes of being with ideas and places over time. He has been exploring the gradual making of counter-narrative around rapid and drastic changes in uses of water and land around urban peripheries.
Image courtesy of Kush Badhwar.
Kush's residency is realised in collaboration with the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
