Five Weeks, Two Cities: Inside the FAACII Artist Residency in India

On 21 August, two painters arrived in Colaba with empty canvases and no brief. Over the next five weeks they will work through Bombay and then Jaipur, and whatever they make will be theirs. This is the inaugural FAACII Artist Residency India — fully sponsored, deliberately small, and built around a single question: what happens to a painter's practice when you give them India, time, and nothing to deliver?

What the residency actually is

FAACII — For Art and Culture in India Inc. — is a New York-based 501(c)(3) public charity dedicated to advancing and preserving India's artistic and cultural heritage. Its remit is largely institutional: museum development, exhibitions, education and community access — the infrastructure that determines whether an artist can build a career at home rather than by leaving. The residency is its flagship programme, and the part of that work which reaches artists directly.

The 2026 edition runs 21 August to 27 September, split across two Abode Boutique Hotels properties:

• Abode Bombay — weeks 1 to 3, 21 August to 14 September. A heritage building in Colaba, Mumbai's cultural and creative nerve centre. The early weeks are for settling into the country and finding the city's rhythm.
• Abode Jaipur — weeks 4 and 5, 14 to 27 September. Inside the Walled City on Kishanpole Bazaar, steps from Hawa Mahal, the City Palace and the artisan quarters.

The split is the point. Bombay is fast, cosmopolitan, commercial in the best sense. Jaipur is slower, older, and organised around making things by hand. Abode has done this before — the programme's first outing hosted the artist Michal Raz at Abode Bombay in 2022 — but 2026 is the first full edition: two artists, two cities, five weeks.

That second city is not scenery. As the residency page has it: "Jaipur is not a backdrop — it is the material."

The two artists

One international, one Indian — that pairing is structural, not incidental.

Mary Pye (b. 2001, Manchester) graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2025 and works through deposition and erosion: pigment laid down, shifted, withdrawn, allowed to settle over time. Her canvases circle longing, belonging and spiritual attention, and they ask to be met slowly. She has shown with MeSo in London — including an exhibition hosted with Bulgari, and a group show at The Hilight in Battersea — and in Mumbai and Delhi, and her work is held in the AdP Museum of Contemporary Art in Ahmedabad. She spoke to MeSo Mag last spring about faith, freedom and finding her voice.

Parnika Mittal (b. 1993) works between Delhi and London, with an MA in Painting from Central Saint Martins. Her paintings begin as sketches and emotional notations in the margins of journals, and carry the residue of movement — fleeting intimacies, dislocation, the instability of a shifting identity. She has exhibited at Tate Modern and Somerset House, and in 2018 completed a residency at High House in Norfolk with Antony Gormley. Her conversation with MeSo Mag on colour as memory is the best way in.

Putting them together was a decision, not a coincidence. Parnika is returning to a country she grew up across — Agra, a boarding school in the hills, Mumbai, Delhi — with a practice built on exactly that dislocation. Mary is encountering it for the first time, with a method that depends on stillness, in cities that offer none. They shared a wall earlier this year in The Mythologies of Colour at Soho House Mumbai; five weeks in a shared studio is a far more demanding version of the same conversation.

The curatorial committee

A residency without structure is a holiday with better light. A residency with too much of it produces work made for the mentor.

So the studio time is unstructured and genuinely the artists' own, and the support sits alongside it rather than on top: ongoing mentorship from the FAACII Curatorial Committee across the full five weeks — critical dialogue, curatorial framing, and help developing the new work as it emerges. Three curators, chosen because they represent three different parts of the system a painter eventually has to navigate.

Sadaf Padder, independent curator, Brooklyn. Her practice spans migration, ecology, material histories and cultural memory, with a sustained emphasis on education and long-term support of artists. She sits on the boards of the Vera List Center and 12 Gates Arts, is a visiting critic at Columbia University, and was Art Omi's 2026 Curator-in-Residence.

Divya Pande, Head of Sales at Victoria Miro. Over a decade at the centre of the international art market — building collections, placing work with private and institutional collectors, and guiding artists' careers across London, Venice and the fair circuit, after an earlier stretch at Bonhams. She is fluent in both the commercial and curatorial sides of a practice, which is rarer than it sounds.

Dr Ghadah W. Alharthi, Associate Professor in Culture and Innovation at Central Saint Martins, UAL. A cultural adviser specialising in cultural ecosystems and creative economy development, she advises governments, museums and foundations across Europe and the Middle East, and is a Patron of the V&A and the Royal Academy of Arts.

New York, London, and the Gulf–Europe corridor: three different vantage points on the same career. It means each artist leaves having been read by three genuinely different kinds of eye rather than flattered by one.

Three crafts, three studios

Alongside the studio time and a programme of cultural site tours organised by Abode across both cities, both painters spend time inside working craft studios: in Mumbai watching master artisans at close range, with the tools and processes explained as they go, and in Jaipur working through the stages themselves.

Embroidery, Mumbai — with Monica Shah. Shah is creative director and co-founder of JADE by Monica & Karishma, the Mumbai house that grew out of the Chanakya textile ateliers, and founder of its Grassroot Artisans Project working with India's indigenous craft communities. Artisans from the JADE atelier — who have practised these crafts across generations — demonstrate three surface-embellishment techniques live, and each one turns out to rhyme with something a painter already does.

Aari is a fine chain stitch worked with a hooked needle, producing a continuous, unbroken line of remarkable precision. It is drawing, essentially, with the same problem drawing has: the line commits you.

Zardozi is metallic embroidery from the royal ateliers — zari, wire, dabka and sequins couched onto the fabric piece by piece to build a surface that stands up off the cloth. That is impasto by another route, and it is worked from the front while the structure holds from behind.

Moti Bharat places beads and pearls one at a time, each secured by hand, until the motif accumulates into texture. Mark by mark, and nothing recoverable once it is set.

Thread instead of pigment, but the same decisions about layering, density and when to stop.

Jewellery and stones, Mumbai — with Karan Kothari. A private atelier in South Mumbai, working in coloured stones and the cutting and setting that bring them out. Where embroidery is accumulation, this is its inverse: colour that already exists inside a material and has to be found by removing everything around it. Both painters treat colour as a carrier of feeling; spending a day with someone who treats it as a physical property — with a hardness, a grain and a right angle to be cut on — is a useful correction.

Carpet weaving and dyeing, Jaipur — with Tissage. Founded in Jaipur in 1974 as Kapoor Carpets, Tissage has spent five decades on hand-knotted rugs in wool, silk, mohair and cashmere, and now works with artists on contemporary designs built over the old weaving techniques. One of its collections is called Impasto, after the painting technique it borrows from — so this is a studio that has already spent years translating brushwork into knots, and a painter arriving in it is a genuinely two-way exchange.

This is the workshop where the artists get their hands in. Tissage takes them through the stages in sequence: the weaving and the hand-knotting itself, then dyeing, then finishing techniques such as embossing, where the pile is cut back to raise a pattern in relief. Which is to say the last stage of making a Tissage rug is erosion: thousands of hours of accumulated knots, carved back to reveal the image.

The dyeing is the other half. Rajasthani natural dyeing is slow, water-dependent and impossible to hurry: the exact opposite of opening a tube.

2027

Both places for 2026 are filled and applications are closed. The 2027 edition is not open yet, but you can register interest now at faacii.org to hear first when it is. Sponsorship for future editions is open at contact@faacii.org — as is the door for institutions who want to host one.

The 2026 residency runs to 27 September, closing with exhibition presentations in Bombay and Jaipur.

Both artists are represented by MeSo Ventures, and a selection of their available work sits in the artworks catalogue. To enquire about available works by either artist, or to be introduced properly to their practice, contact the gallery.