ABOUT US
Offset Projects is an artist-led publishing imprint, art-book library, and curatorial initiative founded by Anshika Varma. Emerging from an ethos of care and collaboration, it engages with photography and book-making as spaces of community and reflection. The initiative explores how visual language can become a means of companionship, criticality, and shared inquiry—particularly within and beyond the contexts of South Asia.
Offset Projects operates as a fluid collective, inviting artists, writers, and thinkers to experiment with ideas of authorship, materiality, and narrative form. Its publishing arm, Offset Press, collaborates closely with artists to create books that expand the possibilities of self-publishing and artistic expression. Titles such as Guftgu, SISNU, Publishing Shifts: South Asia, The Artist Book, and Navigating Global Audiences reflect its commitment to diverse voices and the evolving relationship between image, text, and place.
The Offset Pitara, a travelling library of visual books from South Asia and its diaspora, extends this philosophy into public and educational spaces—encouraging open access, circulation, and conversation.
Alongside its bookshop and library programs, Offset hosts residencies, reading rooms, workshops, and exhibitions that nurture experimentation, peer exchange, and long-term relationships in the arts. 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.
With a growing presence at international art book fairs and festivals, Offset Projects continues to expand the dialogue around publishing, authorship, and care—reimagining the book as a living site of connection and creative solidarity.
DETAILED HISTORY
Officiated in 2019, Offset Projects, is an artist-led initiative by Anshika Varma to create a means of thinking on formats around engagements in visual language and book-making. The Offset Pitara (2018), a curated library of visual books that started from Varma’s collection, was formalised as a travelling trunk of discoveries which the artist took into public spaces across the country, existing and adapting to the spaces and communities it would become a part of. In its travelling avatar it helped create programs within government schools, public parks, community centers in neighbourhoods, universities, institutes and festivals across the country. 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 and now heading into its third reprint, 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. This first edition was distributed freely to educational institutions and organizations as a means of bringing conversations around minority rights, gender, nationhood and caste structures into the classroom. A second edition was later published in 2022 and lives in the collections of the MET, MoMA and MEP along with multiple homes around the world. 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 creation of the Offset Bookshop in 2021 allowed for the dissemination of works from the region through invitations and participations to share photography books from South Asia to many book fairs, often bringing this medium in its diversity for the first time to spaces such as Printed Matter(USA), Booked: Hong Kong Book Fair, Athens Art Book Festival (Greece), Arles Book Fair (France), Polycopies-Paris Photo (France), Focal Point (UAE), The Library Project (Ireland) and many more. This format of dissemination is extremely conducive to expanding a global understanding of the experiments in South Asia and allows bringing independent titles from different parts of the world at the bookshop. Artists such as Dayanita Singh have offered special Offset editions of their books, Gauri Gill and Sohrab Hura have made their books available through the bookshop and Prarthna Singh and Serena Chopra have worked with them in bringing their publications to life.
TEAM
ANSHIKA VARMA
FOUNDER
Anshika Varma is a photographer with an interest in personal, collective and mythical histories. Combining her curiosity to study cultural and social evolution with storytelling, her work often looks at the emotional connection between an individual and their environment. Her practice is defined through processes of collective participation. With photography and book-making, she is interested in exploring the intricate relationship between memory and object as markers of one’s identity. The book becomes an important medium of work for the artist to align with her interest in the democratic dissemination of artistic expression and break notions of exclusivity in access and ownership of art.
ANANYA GAUTAM
INTERN
Ananya Gautam is a visual artist and designer holding a Masters in Photography Design from the National Institute of Design. Her creative practice is an inquiry into the nature of memory, familial narratives, and ecological relationships, founded on the belief that design transcends conventional mediums.Ananya’s key projects include the co-curation of an international multimedia print exhibition on the India-Scotland relationship for the British Council in 2023, spanning venues in Delhi, Ahmedabad, and Edinburgh. Her visual work will also be showcased at the Student’s Kochi Biennale 2025.
PREVIOUS INTERNS
AHMAD NOORUL SHAQULAIN
Ahmad Noorul Shaqulain is a New Delhi-based photographer, specializing in documentary photography with formal education from the Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts and Communication. Continuously refining his craft, he focuses on portraiture, lifestyle, photobooks, and bookmaking to stay aligned with contemporary visual trends. Driven by curiosity, Ahmad blends diverse formats and draws inspiration from his personal journal, crafting thoughtful and compelling visual narratives.
ISHA BHATACHARYA
Isha is a Curator and Programme Manager at Khoj International Artists Association, New Delhi.
She occasionally writes when the act doesn’t seem too daunting. She is deeply interested in regional folklore, pop culture, cinema, and art history.
Both art and cinema fascinate her immensely. Her fondness for the arts, however, comes secondary to her love for children and she believes that there is no use to art if there are not enough children to appreciate it.
SOUMYA JAYANTI
Soumya Jayanti is an editor and researcher with an MA in English from Ambedkar University, Delhi. She has worked in independent publishing for over three years at the intersection of textual and visual cultures. Her interests include the materiality of the book and analog photography, radical literature and politics, print culture, and critical theory.
SOYEOHANG RAI
Soyeohang Rai (b.2001, Sikkim) works with images and texts as a poet and photographer, based in New Delhi, India. His work is an exploration of rural folk in a contemporary narrative and man-made identities.
Among his interests are indigenous queer representation, oral narratives of the Himalayas and a keen interest in fashion as a historical tool of inquiry. His work is selectively accessible and is currently building his archive.
He is the recipient of The 2022 Amplify grant, a VII academy alumni and will be participating in the 19th Angkor Photo Festival workshop.
Offset Projects 