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Press  /  March 2026

Absolut Creative Commune Returns, Curated by Spryk

Absolut Creative Commune 2026, Born Colourless

Absolut Creative Commune returned for its fourth edition in 2026, curated by Spryk (Tejas Nair) for the second consecutive year, under a new thematic lens: “Born Colourless.” The philosophy is simple and, in practice, difficult: human beings arrive without prejudice, and everything that later divides us along lines of gender, class, region, and language is learned rather than innate.

At a moment when generative AI has made instant visual creation trivially easy, the platform deliberately re-centers slow art: a thoughtful, hands-on approach rooted in craft, intent, and lived experience. Six emerging and established Indian visual artists were commissioned to respond to the brief — and, notably, most of them started by pushing back against it.

Six Artists, Six Arguments

The 2026 cohort spans clay animation, hand-drawn illustration, traditional 2D animation, and complex mixed-media and 3D environments — six distinct answers to the same prompt about bias and identity.

Abhijit Vinayak

Part of the 2026 cohort exploring bias and identity through the “Born Colourless” brief, featured in the accompanying podcast series’ behind-the-scenes look at process and studio practice.

Damini Gupta

One of six artists commissioned for this edition, working through the platform’s mandate of slow, deliberate craft against the backdrop of instant AI-generated imagery.

Era Namjoshi

Returning to the Creative Commune platform, Namjoshi continues a body of work concerned with pattern, repetition, and the visual language of shared cultural memory.

Akshita Sinha

Delhi-based, working in a dense world of repeated faces and abstract forms that resist easy reading — a direct response to how bias so often comes from the need to simplify people into fixed ideas.

Amalendu Kaushik

A National Institute of Design graduate based in Guwahati, working in traditional 2D animation and drawing from the visual culture of the Northeast.

Surabhi Banerjee

Trained as an architect in Mumbai and now based in Bangalore, Banerjee carries that architectural sensibility directly into her illustration practice.

The Process: A New Podcast Series

For the first time, the platform launched an accompanying podcast series with the commissioned artists — conversations, behind-the-scenes glimpses of sketches and drafts, and intimate studio-style moments that reveal how ideas evolve over time. Produced by skip-a-beat and hosted by Spryk, the series runs alongside the visual commissions as The Process, skip-a-beat’s ongoing media strand.

Project Credits