Officiated in 2019, Offset Projects, is an artist-led initiative by Anshika Varma to create ways of thinking around engagements in visual language and book-making. Created with the aim to expand relationships with visual language outside the fragilities of art echo chambers, the initiative exists within the form of a fluid collective, inviting collaborators to play and experiment within its unstructured and expanded identity with the belief that story telling lies at the heart of human creative energy.
The Offset Pitara (2018), a curated library of visual books was formalised as a travelling trunk which existed as pop-up reading rooms in public spaces across the country, existing and adapting to the spaces and communities it would become a part of. The library lays specific focus on authorship from the Global South and its diaspora, housing many rare books and unpublished works by artists from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Egypt, Iran, Ukraine, Myanmar and beyond, along with known and unknown titles from the West, and has been the grounding force for its activations in visual language and culture.
Its open-access artist talk formats, started in 2019, have led to an expanded understanding of lens media practices in the region and found multiple iterations as podcasts, online video channels, site specific exhibitions and a publishing ethos seeped in collaborative exercises to support independent authorship in the arts.
Guftgu, first published in 2021, is a deconstructed multilingual book that presents the works of 10 lens media practitioners to assert the diverse voices in a region often constrained by its geographical identity. Offset's residency programs are interdisciplinary in nature, inviting linguists, writers, and paper artists among many to respond to and create from their contemporary environments.
The Offset Bookshop (2021) is the country's first photobook store with a focus on indi south asian publications.