NDSM ARTIST IN RESIDENCE 2026: MAKSUD ALI MONDAL

Stichting NDSM-werf is proud to announce Maksud Ali Mondal as its Artist in Residence 2026. During a three-month residency, Ali Mondal will develop a proposal for a site-specific project that explores the history, scale, and character of the NDSM wharf. The residency will conclude with a public programme, where the artist will share the research and creative process with Stichting NDSM-werf's network and the wider public.  

Launched in 2025, the NDSM Residency creates a direct link between the site's industrial heritage and today's creative industries. Conceived as a space to dream and make, the programme offers emerging artists the opportunity to develop ambitious, large-scale, and context-specific work. The selection committee consisted of Afaina de Jong, Ilga Minjon and Petra Heck and Bram Kroon from Stichting NDSM-werf. We look forward to working with Maksud and sharing the results of the residency with the public.

Maksud Ali Mondal
Maksud Ali Mondal was born in Bankura, West Bengal, India. He completed BFA and MFA from Kala Bhavan, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, in 2019 and the Royal Academy of Art, Netherlands, in 2016.  

His practice includes facilitating experiential understanding of disintegrative processes of nature through site-specific, performative, and time-based installation, using sculpture, painting, video and photography, including temperature, humidity, moisture, damp, and light.

His work generates reflections on how we understand ourselves concerning each other, including other species, organisms and society, fostering a critical dialogue with socio-political and ecological discourse in the contemporary environment.

His work deals with microbial contamination as a conversational expression, grounded in the observation of listening, seeing, and experiencing where life is being forced, suppressed, controlled, and dominated, based on their behaviour, name, language, religion, colour, identity, and is defined through the question of valuable or valueless, purity or impurity. These reflect in his works as a form of unconsidered, unnoticed, neglected, abandoned, or non-human interactions.  

His works are process-based with a disintegrative nature, experimenting widely in search of the biological processes and materials suited to a particular work. Through his practice, he engages with anthropology and ecology through dialogue with the existing ecosystem, evolutionary biological processes, and the existing situations on site and working with the bio-actants, thus situated at the interdisciplinary intersection of visual art, anthropology, biology, chemistry, agriculture, and gardening. He has been working with the time-based, immersive, sensorial, ephemeral, and performative processes of nature through the engagement of making, growing, and transforming.  

He received an award from Micropia, Science Museum, Amsterdam, 2024, and an international award from the Kochi-Muziris Students' Biennale in 2019, the INLAKS Fine Art Award in 2021, the FICA Emerging Artist Award 2020, and the National Award from the Ministry of Culture, India, in 2018. His work has been showcased at the ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2025; Ujazdowski Castle, Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland, 2025; Micropia Science Museum, Amsterdam, 2024; Critical Zones, Indian Museum, Kolkata, 2023; Five Million Incidents, Goethe Institut Delhi, 2020; among others.

Maksud has finished a two-year residency program at Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is working between India and the Netherlands.