BEYOND SERENDIPITY

India Art Fair 2022

Image courtesy - Serendipity Arts Foundation at India Art Fair 2020

Information

A dial flicks within, clouds move in the sky and there’s a sense of time that has vanished reappearing in small droplets from the sky. For the team at Serendipity, the long and circular arc of the pandemic has evoked constant introspection. At the India Art Fair, we present our first on-ground initiative that scoops up the preceding months into a space for all that is returning to us: the commons, conversations, discovery, play and rest. Meet us at Reset, a space designed for acts of sharing. Draw from and add to our pool of stories, books, ideas, and beverages, as we “reset” collectively. 
 

Learn about some of what we’ve been upto in the past year: a residency reimagined as a digital Food Lab; grants that support projects harnessing the virtual turn in the arts with care; an anthology of bold voices in the arts; a digital programme connecting the oceanic worlds of Australia and India; and more.

Projects

Food Lab

To say this past year has been stressful would be an understatement. Every routine we were familiar with was disrupted, and all our attention was directed to the virtual world – to stay connected with friends and family, for entertainment, and of course, for work. One of the most pleasurable activities – cooking together, eating together – was no longer possible for so many in the way we were used to. And yet, one of the greatest escapes of this time has been food. Thinking about food. Consuming it through YouTube videos and Instagram reels. Experimenting with recipes both elaborate and simple. Connecting through food by sharing photos and videos of things we cooked with family and friends, or on social media.
 
 But food is so much more than that. At a time when we are questioning the ways in which we consume, food is one of the areas in which inequality is glaring. Food consumption is intrinsically tied to our environment and the positive and negative impact in can have on it. In a country like India, the food histories and traditions are immeasurable.
 
For this year’s Serendipity Arts Residency, we invited two residents to think about the power of food, and all aspects associated with it through a Food Lab, which ran between August to November, supplemented with a robust programme of (online) talks and workshops. A variety of issues including Food Origins/History; Food Inequality/Sustainability; Food Policy; Food and Culture/Traditions, Nutrition, Food Writing and even Food Design, were explored through online conversations.
Image Courtesy : Tansha Vohra
Image Courtesy : Tansha Vohra
Image Courtesy : Sharanya Deepak
Image Courtesy : Sharanya Deepak

RESIDENCY PROGRAMMER

Elizabeth Yorke

RESIDENTS

Sharanya Deepak – Birds of Hunger Flock Nowhere
Tansha Vohra – The Boochi Project: Entomophagy in India

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Serendipity Arts Virtual Grants

In conceptualizing the Serendipity Arts Virtual programme in December 2020, we considered many approaches to understanding, exploring and subverting the predetermined logics and ways of the digital platforms we’ve been flung into. People have sought intimacy, freedom, connection, solidarity through online platforms before—but rarely has our reliance on these platforms felt so visible, so extreme. We pondered on what it means to treat the internet as “site/s”—as moveable terrains that reveal as much as they conceal; as blocks that feel heavy and new but can be reassembled; as incidents that prompt action, thought, response.
 
In continuation of Serendipity Arts Virtual, we awarded a grant to two collectives, groups, duos, or collaborations to develop an interdisciplinary project adapted to the digital space, to be hosted on the Serendipity Arts Virtual site/domain.

Project Suno Grantees

Kanchan
Mayank 
Sukriti

Project Homemakers Grantees

Pritish Bali
Anu Bali

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Transmitter: Darwin x Delhi

Transmitter is an international digital lab conducted by Serendipity Arts Foundation (India) and Darwin Festival (Australia), supported by the Australia Council for the Arts. The provocation is to interrogate the relationship between technology and the body and how this relationship might become a creative catalyst for performance in both virtual and physical spaces. Our engagement with the arts has shifted radically in the last year and opened up opportunities beyond the physical space of art-making, to use technology to interpret one’s practice and examine how we adapt ourselves in this hybrid space. We’re interested in investigating how artistic process and spatial relationships are informed by technology.

Image courtesy - Serendipity Arts Foundation, Project - Emissions , part of Museum of Sounds in my Head. Artists - Varun Desai & Viraag Desai Curated by - Sneha Khanwalkar Image credit : Philippe Calia and Sunil Thakkar.

Artist

VISHAL KUMARASWAMY
NAINA SEN
RAGHAV HANDA
FARAH MULLA

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