Grants

APRE Emerging Practice Grant

Nuture. Integrity. Research. Future.

The Grants initiative reflects APRE Art House’s commitment to extending the role of the gallery beyond exhibitions into long-term ecosystem building. Established to respond to structural gaps that often limit access and opportunity in South Asia, the program is conceived as a gesture of trust and responsibility. It is offered without expectation, rooted in the belief that sustained creativity and cultural production thrive when given frameworks of care and support.

Mission

The mission of the APRE Art House Grants is to strengthen the South Asian art ecosystem by supporting artists, researchers, and cultural practitioners through purposeful financial assistance, mentorship, and visibility. Our grants provide timely interventions at pivotal stages in a career, enabling practitioners to expand their work with confidence, integrity, and ambition.

Vision

We envision a South Asian art landscape that is resilient, diverse, and internationally engaged, where early-career practitioners are supported with the same rigor and seriousness afforded to established voices. Through the Grants, APRE Art House affirms its role in strengthening cultural infrastructure by cultivating practices that might otherwise remain unseen, ensuring that experimentation, critical dialogue, and research are sustained with integrity

Why Grants?

APRE Art House offers grants to emerging practitioners across the South Asian art ecosystem whose work demonstrates both promise and rigor. At formative stages, even modest support can have a lasting impact, enabling practitioners to deepen their research, develop new projects, or present their work to wider audiences.

Grants 2026

The APRE Emerging Practice Grant 2026 offers emerging practitioners a comprehensive platform to develop their work, providing financial assistance to support the creation of new or ongoing projects. Recipients also receive a year-long mentorship with the APRE team, offering guidance and critical feedback to refine and strengthen their practice. In addition, the grant includes the opportunity to present work within the gallery’s program, situating the artist within a professional and critically engaged context that fosters visibility, dialogue, and meaningful engagement with audiences, collectors, and peers.

APRE Emerging Practice Grantee 2025

Brief note on 2025 Emerging Practice Grant

The 2025 edition received over 1,270 applications, reflecting an extraordinary breadth of artistic inquiry. Submissions arrived from across India, alongside a significant number from South Asia, underscoring both the urgency of such initiatives and the regional resonance of APRE’s research-led approach to artist support. The volume and depth of applications revealed a generation of practitioners engaged with material experimentation, expanded media, and critical reflection on contemporary conditions.

Selection was guided by the urgency of the practice, the clarity and intent of the proposed utilisation of funds, and the overall artistic merit of the work, foregrounding practices that demonstrated both conceptual rigour and the potential for sustained development.

We are pleased to offer the 2025 grantee, Arieno Kera, an exhibition at APRE Art House, alongside sustained institutional support in the form of mentorship and critical guidance.

Arieno Kera

Arieno Kera belongs to the Naga indigenous community and is currently based in Nagaland. She is interested in process-based art practice and engage with painting, drawing, installation and video, as an archive of local tradition and cultural memory.

Exploring a material-based practice she engages critically with tools of representation derived from various traditional elements from her own indigenous background from Nagaland and interprets them into contemporary idioms of image-making while conversing with practice of drawing as an interface of representation, process and mark-making. She translates personal experience into a performative signifier of memory and transformation.


She finished her Master's degree in Fine Arts from Kala Bhavan, Viswa Bharati University, Shantiniketan.

On receiving the Grant

"I am grateful to have received the APRE artist Grant. It has offered a vital support for my ongoing practice by sustaining and enabling material and conceptual exploration as I venture into new mediums."- Arieno Kera

Project supported by the Grant

The Grant supports my ongoing project that explores the memories and narratives surrounding Atsa Chiepha (grandmother’s belt). Working through the weaving tradition of the Chiepha, the project becomes a way of engaging with and introducing the culture around Naga textile.

Planned Outcome

"My practice is deeply process-oriented. While it may culminate in an exhibition, the outcomes are not predefined, emerging instead through open-ended experimentation and inquiry."- Arieno Kera

Future categories will extend to researchers, curators, and cultural producers, ensuring that the full spectrum of artistic and intellectual practice is supported. The structure is holistic, designed to strengthen the cultural ecosystem at multiple points of engagement.

Patrons interested in contributing to the APRE Art House Grants and fostering the growth of South Asian art are invited to contact us at info@aprearthouse.com

Image Credits:

Pahul Singh, Pragati Dalvi Jain, Radha Rathi, Arieno Kera.