Serendipity Arts Virtual

Serendipity Arts Foundation's new digital experience, Serendipity Arts Virtual, begins today. Taking place on your personal digital devices from the 4th December – 21st of December, the virtual programme seeks to conceptualise and adapt artistic visions and projects for spaces that can be created and accessed digitally; not merely using the internet as an alternative medium, but as a dimension with its own unique properties that can encourage new thinking and create new possibilities for how art is created and how it is experienced, for years to come. We present a Platform edit of things you should look forward to at the programme.

Curated Projects
Rarely has our reliance on digital platforms felt as visible and as extreme as it has in 2020. How do we produce experiences and ideas that retain the core of engagement, dialogue and collaboration so intrinsic to our physical initiatives in an isolated, digital landscape of devices? Serendipity Arts Virtual is the co-exploration of these and many other questions raised by curators and artists. A result of this is some of the curated projects below:

My story | Your story | Our story, curated by Anmol Vellani: This project will have two performances—in live and recorded medium respectively, and an unfinished story. The artists involved are Jyoti Dogra and Deepika Arvind.

The Last Poet, curated by Amitesh Grover: The Last Poet is a multilayered art form with theatre, film, sound art, creative coding, digital scenography, and live performance. A web-portal opens to rooms, and rooms open to doors, and inside, there is a precise and unambiguous fiction. You may treat this experience as a counterintuitive assurance of life, or you may become unmoored from your life’s comfort with reality. The possible world of this cyber theatre is the only universe in which we can be absolutely certain about something - a cartography of shared memory. In it, there are multilogues, there are multiple possibilities in how you can experience it, and there are infinite freedoms. 

The Body-in-Movement, curated by Mandeep Raikhy: Imagined as an interconnected web of thinking, seeing, making and writing, this curatorial proposition is conceived of as laboratory that enables a group of artists from several disciplines to think through what it means to move/create/perform in these times, what the digital space has to offer to the emergent discourse of the body and the ways in which presence/ absence of the body is constructed and experienced within the web space. The artists involved are: Padmini Ray Murray, Shweta Bhattad, Jyotsna, Aseng Borang, Masrat Zahra, Shanthi Muniswamy, MC Mawali (Official Name: Aklesh Sutar), and Asim Waqif. 

Goa Familia, curated by Lina Vincent: Goa Familia was conceived in 2019 as an evolving archive exploring and documenting the multidimensional aspects of family histories. Over the period of a year, the compilation has grown substantially, through the participation and contribution of families across Goa. While the primary archive consists of digitized photographs from family albums, the documentation also extends to video and audio recordings of individuals sharing stories from personal memory as well as collective histories. Goa Familia attempts to locate collections relevant to the representation of Goa's past. These collections include colonial archives and personal collections, images made in a professional context that could range from photojournalism to anthropology, the contents of shoeboxes tucked away in lofts, private albums, and photographs made by Goan and non-Goans professionals and amateurs, based in Goa or anywhere in the world, with a Goan connection.

Performances:
The programme is brimming with exciting performances, all of them worth watching and experiencing. Some of the are One, One & One, Vertigo Dance Company’s performance choreographed by Noa Wertheim and a dance workshop, supported by the Embassy of Israel in India. A performance of Introducing... Antigone, Interrupted by Scottish Dance Theatre will be presented during the virtual programme, with support from British Council India as well.

Workshops and Conversations:
Serendipity Arts Virtual will also proactively engage with people from a range of demographics guided by a strong policy of diversity and inclusion and offering a selection free workshops and conversations. Highlights include craft artisan workshops including Phad, Madhubani and Gond paintings, guided drawings, inclusive art workshops for children, DIY sensory engagement activities, Kite making, Scroll painting, Sanjhi paper cutting, recipes from Goan restaurants and much more. Viewers will also get to attend Zoom talks and active engagements around the commissioned Serendipity Arts Virtual project. These talks or engagements will be with the artists and curators who are working on the project. Conversations also include roundtables on the iconic yesteryears arts and literary journal, The Modern Review, that shaped India’s political and cultural discourse as part of an upcoming research project called Text / Matters, and exploring the print publics of the past and present. 

For more information and to attend the programme, click here.