Curator Aishwarya Kumar Follow.Art Card

About me

Aishwarya Kumar is a curator and PhD candidate in Culture Studies at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, an FCT scholarship holder, a Europaeum Scholar (2026–2027), and the founder of Stage Rabbit, a transnational space for artistic research connecting practitioners across Portugal, India, Belgium, and Spain, and is also the founder and Artistic Director of a transnational project co-funded by the European Union, Sobremesa: Vagaries of the Palate (ongoing), leading a five-partner consortium across Portugal, Italy, Greece, and the Basque region of Spain. The project explores how food practices shape cultural identity, memory, and transnational belonging through curatorial research, artist residencies, and public programming, and uses this as a lens to engage in policy on migration and integration, culture, and diplomacy. The project is currently in its pilot phase, with phase 2 development underway to expand the research into the Balkan region and Europe-Africa relations.

As an interdisciplinary artist, her work explores how the body and movement as a method that affects curiosity and perception. Her research is applied towards building cultural ecosystems through the arts. Since 2016, Kumar’s practice has examined how systems and aesthetics are shaped by performance. Through fieldwork across South Asia and Northern and Southern Europe, she develops immersive performance environments using endurance-based methodologies, including dance, somatics, and deep-sea diving.

Her past work has been presented through the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Contemporanea (2024), and Arte Capital (2024). In 2025–2026, she curated Down The Rabbit Hole for The Wrong Biennale; won the Culture Moves Europe (Poland, 2025) for a site-specific study of art-science practices in Poland; was the assistant curator for A Study in Isolation and Universe Pavilion, presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and has a chapter on Hospitality of children through Springer publication coming out in 2026.