About FCEA X Plaksha Residency –

What happens when the logical rigor of engineering collides with the boundary-pushing empathy of contemporary art? FCEA at Plaksha University is an initiative designed to explore exactly that.

True innovation requires both technical mastery and deep human perspective. Art Incept partnered with Plaksha, a reimagined STEM university, to build a unique interdisciplinary residency program. The residency serves a dual purpose: equipping future tech leaders with empathy and creative visual literacy, while empowering contemporary artists to scale their expressive storytelling using technology.

Institute –

Plaksha University, established in 2021, is reimagining technology education and research in India through a unique model of collective governance led by a distinguished Academic Advisory Board and a community of entrepreneurs, business leaders, and academicians. The university fosters a strong research culture through interdisciplinary centers focused on clean energy, sustainable agriculture, water security, and equitable health, supported by active faculty research and a robust doctoral program. Its reimagined undergraduate education offers interdisciplinary courses through the innovative Freshmore curriculum, which blends design, humanities, computing, and sciences beyond traditional departmental boundaries. As a greenfield institution, Plaksha benefits from the freedom to innovate in curriculum, pedagogy, and institutional design, while its entrepreneurial and agile culture encourages bold experimentation and rapid execution.

Residency Details –

The program unfolds in three transformative phases:

The 5-Day Foundation: An intensive orientation curated by Art Incept that primes STEM students to look past their “logical curtains.” Through historical analysis, sketching, and converting data into abstract art, students learn to navigate ambiguity and observe the world with empathy.

The Technical Collaboration: A phase where science students and resident artists collaborate. Here, technology becomes a medium for a thought.

The Permanent Legacy: Beyond the workshops and prototypes, the residency leaves a lasting mark on the physical architecture of Plaksha. The resident artists work onsite to leave an artwork for students to encourage them to pause, look up, and reconnect with an expression larger than logic.

Through this residency, Art Incept is not just changing how code is written or how art is made; we are fostering human-centric innovators who build with intent, soul, and a profound understanding of the human experience.

Participating Artists 2026

Badush Babu

Badush Babu works primarily in charcoal, using it not just as a medium but as a way of thinking through transformation, memory, and fragility. Trained at Raja Ravi Varma College of Fine Arts and the College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram, his practice spans drawing, soot impressions, stop-motion, and documentation.

Inspired by The Metamorphosis, Badush explores how grief, solitude, and time alter both bodies and landscapes. His ongoing Silent Stories series emerged from witnessing his grandfather’s gradual withdrawal into gardening during his final years. Human figures slowly disappeared from the work, replaced by fallen flowers, dried leaves, and dead insects — traces of quiet transformation and attentive living.

Influenced by Khasakkinte Ithihasam and the films of Abbas Kiarostami, his work joins a broader charcoal tradition associated with William Kentridge, Shanthamani Muddaiah, and Prabhakar Pachpute. For Unfinished Histories, Badush offers a quiet meditation on craft, solitude, and careful observation.

Parul Sharma

Parul Sharma trained as a painter at the College of Art, New Delhi, where she also completed her MFA. Her practice explores how architecture shapes movement, perception, and bodily experience, particularly through the lens of gender and urban space.

Beginning with sketches made during bus rides through Delhi, her attention gradually shifted from people to the atmospheres of corridors, façades, and shifting light. After being told during a mural project that women could not manage work at such scale, she began painting directly onto her studio walls, allowing pigment to move across surfaces and beyond boundaries — both physical and social.

Through drawings, murals, and pop-up books such as Breathing Space I, Mapping of the Sky, and Memory of Dust, Sharma creates works that resist containment within a frame. Her recent experiments incorporate studio dust and sensory elements like temperature, extending her exploration of space as lived, felt, and politically charged.