May, 2026.- In the 2026 artistic ecosystem, where Generative AI enables instant visual creation, a vital question emerges: where does the artist’s voice reside when execution is no longer a bottleneck? For Tejas Nair, better known as Spryk, the answer lies in intention. Leading the latest edition of the Absolut Creative Commune, Nair introduces the theme “Born Colourless,” a premise that invites six of India’s most innovative artists to strip away inherited biases and aesthetic expectations to explore absolute creative freedom. This project is more than just an exhibition; it is a “slow art” experiment that reclaims craft, process, and lived experience in the face of mass production, reminding us that while technology may multiply output, only human consciousness can multiply meaning.
In this exclusive interview with Roastbrief, Tejas Nair breaks down his role as a catalyst for this “creative commune,” where everything from cinematic 3D miniatures to traditional hand-drawn animations converge. Nair reflects on how India’s cultural diversity should not be a rigid mold, but a fluid starting point. Through a dialogue moving between music, multimedia art, and curation, we discover how global brands like Absolut are taking on the responsibility of nurturing artistic depth over simple commercial aesthetics. It is a lesson in clearing the canvas of prescribed colors to allow the infinite spectrum of human experience to flourish, reaffirming that the creative process is, in itself, the most valuable work of art.
1. The Theme “Born Colourless”: You’ve introduced the theme “Born Colourless” for this year’s Absolut Creative Commune. Can you explain the inspiration behind this theme and how it challenges or reframes traditional understandings of color and expression in visual art?
Born Colourless starts from a simple but radical premise: that we arrive in the world without bias, and that everything which divides us gets added later. The theme is Absolut’s ideology, and it resonates deeply with how I think about creative practice, because the best creative work I’ve encountered operates the same way. It doesn’t start from a conclusion. It starts from genuine openness and curiosity.
In the context of visual art in India, that openness is harder than it sounds. We inherit so much. Regional visual traditions, aesthetic expectations, the shorthand of what “Indian art” is supposed to look like for a domestic audience versus an international one. None of that is bad on its own, but it can calcify into something that limits rather than liberates. The theme invites artists to notice those inherited colours and ask whether they’re choosing them or just carrying them.
What I find most exciting about Born Colourless as a curatorial frame is that it doesn’t prescribe an answer. It prescribes a starting condition. And when six artists from genuinely different geographies, with genuinely different practices and life experiences, all begin from that same condition of openness, what they produce together becomes something much larger than any individual voice. The differences don’t disappear. They become the point.
2. Slow Art in an AI Era: At a time when generative AI has made instant visual creation increasingly accessible, you’re championing “slow art”—a deliberate approach rooted in craft, intent, and lived experience. Why is this message particularly urgent right now? What do you believe audiences and artists lose when speed replaces process?
I want to say upfront that I’m not anti-technology. My own practice is spread across music, media, and immersive art, and technology is central to all of it. The urgency around slow art isn’t about rejecting new tools. It’s about something more specific.
When generative AI makes image creation instant, the bottleneck shifts from execution to intention. And if you haven’t built a practice of sitting with intention, of not knowing what you want to say and staying in that uncertainty until something honest surfaces, then speed just means you produce more work before you’ve figured out what you actually think. The output multiplies. The voice doesn’t.
What slow art protects is the process of making unique things. The moment where an artist is genuinely grappling with an idea or a skill, where the next move isn’t obvious, where they have to draw on something particular to their own lived experience and roots to find a way through. That particular process and the particular resolution of it is where the individual voice lives. Damini spent weeks building a stop-motion clay film frame by frame, 588 frames in total, physically reshaping a face through different Indian identities with her hands. Amalendu built an animated film rooted in the Brahmaputra and the visual memory of the Northeast of India. These processes carry something no prompt can access, and that’s what the Commune aims to champion.
3. Curating for the Second Year: You’re curating the Absolut Creative Commune for the second consecutive year. How has your approach evolved between editions? What have you learned from the previous edition that shaped your vision for “Born Colourless”?
The first year was really about understanding what kind of curatorial space this project needs. The interesting thing I took from it was about where to direct creative energy and where to step back. Curating for the second year with the theme Born Colourless as an ideology it is fundamentally about what happens when different perspectives meet without one dominating the other, and that has to be true of the curation itself. If I’m over-directing the outcome, I’m working against the theme.
This year I built the brief to be conceptually precise but formally open. The question every artist starts from is clear. What the answer looks like is entirely theirs. That’s why you end up with Abhijit‘s cinematic 3D miniature city sitting alongside Akshita‘s hand-drawn 2D animation, and all of them feeling like they belong in the same conversation. They arrived at the theme through completely different doors. That only happens when you leave the doors open.
The other shift was investing more time in the conversation before any making started. The brief is a dialogue, not a document. The more each artist could connect Born Colourless to something true in their own life and practice, the more confident and specific their work became. You can feel that in the final pieces.
4. India’s Visual and Cultural Diversity: You’ve described this edition as “a vibrant reflection of India’s visual and cultural diversity.” How does the selection of artists—Era Namjoshi, Akshita Sinha, Amalendu Kaushik, Damini Gupta, Surabhi Banerjee, and Abhijit Vinayak—represent that diversity? What threads connect their distinct practices?
These six artists don’t just come from different cities. They have fundamentally different relationships with making itself. Abhijit works in cinematic 3D CGI and started his practice during the 2020 lockdown in Coimbatore, now building miniature worlds where strangers share a frame without looking at each other’s labels. Amalendu is a National Institute of Design graduate based in Guwahati, working in 2D traditional animation and drawing from the visual culture of the Northeast, a region where hundreds of tribes, languages, and faiths have coexisted for centuries. Akshita, working out of New Delhi with a ballpoint pen, making illustrations about modern existentialism and the feeling of being overwhelmed by the world. Era’s visual language is built on bold shapes, symmetrical compositions and a vibrant color pallete. Surabhi trained as an architect in Mumbai and now lives in Bangalore, and her work carries that architectural sensibility into her illustration practice. Damini has a Masters from the University of the Arts London and works across stop-motion, illustration, and design.
The diversity here isn’t regional shorthand. It’s a range of ways of seeing, making, and understanding what it means to be a contemporary visual artist in India right now.
What connects them is harder to name but easier to feel when you look at the work. All six are still questioning their own practice. None of them are executing a known formula. And all of them, when confronted with the Born Colourless brief, found a way into it that was specific to their own experience rather than generic. Akshita’s piece is about the human collective as a living carpet of interwoven threads. Amalendu’s river carries memory and identity across hundreds of different communities without choosing between them. They each made the same argument by telling a completely different story.
5. A Canvas Free of Prescribed Colour: You said that “a canvas free of prescribed ‘colour’ can hold the most infinite spectrum of experience.” What does it mean to free a canvas from prescribed color? Is this about literal color palettes, or a broader metaphor about creative freedom and resisting categorization?
Both. But the metaphor is doing the heavier work.
Prescribed colour, in the way I mean it, is any expectation that lands on the work before the work has had a chance to generate its own logic. It could be the visual language a platform rewards. It could be what “Indian art” is expected to look like for an international buyer. It could be a genre, a label, a brief that tells you what conclusion to reach before you’ve started. All of that is bias, just wearing creative language.
Born Colourless asks what happens when you subtract that. When the starting point is neutral and open. None of the artists are flattening themselves to fit a predetermined mould, instead they explore a canvas that presents infinite possibilities.
6. Absolut’s Role in Contemporary Indian Art: Absolut has a long history of championing creative expression globally. How do you see the brand’s role in the contemporary Indian art scene specifically? What responsibility does a commercial platform have in nurturing artistic depth and cultural nuance?
What makes the Creative Commune work is that the editorial independence is genuine. The artists are not being asked to make work that looks like Absolut or reflects the brand’s visual identity. They’re being given a stage, and what they do on it and how they respond to the brief or theme is entirely theirs. That matters because Born Colourless as an ideology doesn’t work if the artists aren’t actually free to create.
The Commune also does something specific that I think is valuable for the Indian art ecosystem —it invests visibly in the process. The podcast, the documentation, the drafts and iterations that are shared publicly, all of that makes the act of making as important as the final piece. For a younger artist watching from outside the gallery circuit, that visibility matters. It shows that craft and intent are worth taking seriously, and that a platform can be built around that without compromising the work.
That combination of creative freedom and investment in process is where the responsibility gets honoured. Not through statements, but through what the project actually does.
