Asia Society Arts Game Changer Awards | How CAMP is reworking the rules

Explore how CAMP challenges artistic norms and reshapes art's role in society at the Asia Society Arts Game Changer Awards.

At a time when the future increasingly feels like a repetition of the past, the idea of “game changing” demands scrutiny. On social media, comparisons between 2026 and 2016 circulate with uneasy familiarity: from resurgent authoritarianism to culture wars, and identity politics over visibility and speech. It is precisely this anxiety that gives the Asia Society Arts Game Changer Awards their urgency.

Instituted by Asia Society India, the awards were conceived to recognise practices that have shifted how art is made, circulated, and understood across South Asia. The award’s emphasis is deliberate: individual excellence, once the primary currency of cultural recognition, has revealed its limits in an increasingly unequal world shaped by infrastructure, technology, and access, necessitating collaboration across disciplines.

This year’s awardees underline that shift. The 2026 cohort includes Sri Lankan artist Hema Shironi, whose textile-based practice stitches together post-war memory, Tamil identity, and anti-colonial resistance; Kulpreet Singh, a Punjab-based farmer-artist whose soot drawings emerge directly from agrarian crisis and climate catastrophe; Raghu Rai, whose six-decade photographic archive has shaped how India remembers itself; and CAMP (Critical Art and Media Practices), whose work spans film, surveillance, and open digital archives.

Hema Shironi

One Loan is Taken to Settle Another IV (2023; hand mebroidery on printed fabric and cotton fabric)

Kulpreet Singh