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Practicing Public Art Exploring tools for site-specific dialogues – A Collaboration with FICA Photo credit: Annalisa Mansukhani, Golconda fort, 2015 Key information Application Deadline: 19 October 2022 Duration of the workshop: 5 weeks All sessions for the first four weeks will be held online on Zoom. The last week of sessions will take place on-site […]

Mapping the Shifting Terrains Reading Public/Reading Art – A Collaboration with FICA Ankan Datta, details from his installation made as part of ON-SITE: A Workshop exploring process, dialogue and experimentation, organised by FICA and SAF, 2019 Key information Application Deadline: 1st September 2022Dates: September: 17, 24; October: 1, 8, 15, 22 & 29 Timings: Every Saturday, […]

WOULD I LIE TO YOU? On the Use of Documents in Theatre RED by Living Dance Studio, Picture Credit – Richie Wong Key information Dates: September 1st to October 22nd, 2022Sessions: 3 sessions per week | 4 hours per session | 21 sessions totalTwice a week with facilitators and once a week collaborative/group work at […]

The Time Is Now- A Course on Live Art River Lin, ‘Sleeping in between Tehching Hsieh and On Kawara’. This act, themed as Performance Beyond The Body was part of Out of Turn, a project curated by Meenakshi Thirukode and Asia Art Archive for Serendipity Arts Festival 2018.

Papertrail at C340 by Chennai Photo Biennale Learning Lab & SAF Key information DATE – 28 August – 5 September(Closed on 30th August)TIME – 11 AM – 5PM Venue– Serendipity Arts, New Delhi  About We’re delighted to be hosting books by two outstanding publishers and curators, Yaarbal Books and Offset Projects at the C340 pop-up library […]

Text/Matters: Delhi Arts Week at Serendipity Arts Foundation Key information DATE – April 3-10, 2021TIME – 11 AM – 5PM VENUE – C 340, Defence Colony – a basement space in a residential area in Delhi that functions as a platform for artistic programmes. C340 aims to be space that can adapt itself to various projects, […]

Goa Glitch: Hanif Kureshi CREDITS Supported by Serendipity Arts Festival and Stir Creativity, in partnership with the Corporation of the City of Panaji. Serendipity Arts Festival, together with Stir Creativity, a campaign of Bombay Sapphire talk Global with local conscience and create bridges that unite and empower people. With strong common belief on creative platforms, […]

Line of Flight was a two-part project, showcased at Serendipity Arts Festival 2018, from 15-22 December 2018.

A two-day international symposium exploring various aspects of creative placemaking and engaging with questions such as: What is the relationship between the intervention and its geographic and cultural location––what relations are shared with the selected sites, its ecology, and the histories and anxieties of its contemporary moment? Do these interventions produce meaningful interlocutions in the prevailing urban fabric––what is the mandate, and from where does it emanate?

Conceptualised and directed by Shubha Mudgal, the Music Mapping Project was a research and data collection project involving the systematic documentation (“mapping”) of music makers and their practice in different cities in India.

Open Call Write | art | connect 6 Stand on the Street by Aruna Ganesh Ram, at SAF 2017 The Library of Edible Issues by Elizabeth Yorke and Anusha Murthy, at SAF 2022 The Boochi Project by Tansha Vohra, SAF Food Lab 2021 The Case of the Missing Vegetables by Akash Muralidharan, at SAF 2022 […]

The Rambles of Fatigued Listening in 5¼ Movements AUTHOR  Suvani Suri Movement 1: The Burrow of Unsound The air smells pungent and arid. Fatigue traverses and slowly fills up the site of what once was a burrow, now turned outside-in. Heavy and dazed eyelids gaze at the last remaining parts of the immaculately constructed stone […]

Sound from the Ground: Pre-modern Sonic Practices in India AUTHOR Budhaditya Chattopadhyay A pluck of the strings in the lower registers of the Rudraveena or the Tanpura produces sounds that are as plurivocal and multi-harmonic as the sounds of natural phenomena, such as thunder or rains, or heavy wind through the fields, representing a textural […]

Ṣadā: Her-story and Echoes of Nationhood AUTHOR Shweta Sachdeva Jha fazā ye amn-o-amāñ kī sadā rakheñ qaa.emsuno ye farz tumhārā bhī hai hamārā bhī      —Nusrat Mehdi1 To protect the peace around us forever,Listen, this is our duty, both yours and mine. This year, India completes 75 years of independence as a nation-state, while our perception […]

A Symphony Found in the Wilderness of Noise AUTHOR Padmanabhan “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” – Heraclitus. The first recorded sound is only 165 years old, a cacophony of echoes recorded by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on a phonautogram. […]

Sound and Structure AUTHOR Natasha Singh Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VIII, Oil on Canvas, New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Trains, flyovers, or roads—they all stir a dream of a musical skyline. The patterns and shapes of the old buildings and minarets, when met from a moving vehicle, create an orchestra in the theatre of […]

Sonic Subversions: People’s Music at Chennai’s Margazhi Festival AUTHOR Krishna P Unny The rhythmic jan jan jan of the Parai drums resound through a sabha hall, one of the many elite and conservative performance venues in the heart of Chennai. The artists dance with unmatched energy, moving from corner to corner onstage, in sync. In […]

Building Bodies of Song: Community Singing and Vernacular Song Archives in a Pandemic AUTHOR Shruthi Veena Vishwanath साखी Sakhi 8:55 AM (Everyday from 31 Mar to 6 June, 2020) Arshinagar, Gourbazar, West Bengal Machan setup in the Machan (June 2020) With a bit of acrobatics, I can manage phone, tripod, ektara, bama, ghungroos, all at […]

Birdsong, the Climate Crisis, and Sonic Ecologies of Loss AUTHOR Piya Srinivasan Writing desks are often perched against windows, inviting us into a state of reverie from staring into an endless sky. Another element that lends an almost spiritual orientation to our thoughts is the sound of birds chirping, a sound that is taken for […]

In Search of Natural Silence AUTHOR Nikhil Nagaraj Let’s travel back seventy thousand years. The plains and mountains of the Indian subcontinent are overflowing with life. Two species of prehistoric giants–roof-toothed elephants and giant straight tusked elephants–, hippopotamuses, zebra-like horses, aurochs, Asiatic cheetahs, Sunderban dwarf rhinoceroses and Northern Sumatran rhinoceroses, and Shivalik horses as tall […]

SAF x ASAP Curatorial Research Fellowship 2023 About Art South Asia Project (ASAP) and Serendipity Arts have come together to support a curatorial fellowship program for a diasporic South Asian curator living in the UK. The primary aim of this program is to establish cross-continental connections between South Asia and the UK, which will facilitate […]

Serendipity Arts Foundation and Les Rencontres d’Arles announced the biggest photography, video and new media grant in India, supported by the Institut français en Inde named the Serendipity Arles Grant, with the shared purpose of promoting cultural practices in South Asia.

We’re inviting applications from emerging and mid-career artists who are interested in interdisciplinary practice and paradigm-shifting collaboration.

Serendipity Arts Foundation is very pleased to have supported 2019–2020 Artist in Residence Nikhil Chopra at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York between September 12-20, 2019.

A series of conversations conceptualized by Critical Collective around the myriad topics pertinent to today’s context resulted in a collaboration between the venue, Bikaner House and the principal sponsor, Serendipity Arts Foundation.

My East is Your West, was presented as a Collateral Event of the 56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia. Commissioned by The Gujral Foundation, this landmark exhibition united for the first time at the Biennale the historically conflicting nations of India and Pakistan in a shared exhibition by artists from both countries.

The British Council, in association with Serendipity Arts Foundation and Festival presented a three-day intensive course in Goa in  March 2019 on the core principles of Festival Management.

This little gift from Kashmir to Goa is a window into the intricate work of these women artists, and a small symbol of their resilience and strength. The ornaments were transported to Goa and put for sale during Serendipity Arts Festival 2017.

‘A Tale of Two Cities’ was conceptualized as a one year project facilitating established artists of two countries, India and Sri Lanka, to engage in an investigative/research based art-making process, relooking at the socio-cultural and historical dynamics of two cities, Varanasi and Anuradhapura.

There is a multitude of art and craft forms, folk traditions and festivals that have been steadily declining for many decades and are now almost on the verge of disappearing completely. The increasedly insular outlook and attitude of the majority of the subcontinent is also posing a new threat to many traditional practices that belong to marginalised faiths and communites. Due to the accelerated urbanisation in the rural parts of India, the circumstances are even worse for the agnostic folk traditions in these areas.

The Food Matters Grant supports projects that aim to contribute to the discourse around food and create a knowledge network to promote inquiry into food practices in India and South Asia. Through this grant, we hope to create a space for the exchange of ideas around food habits, traditions, and futures.

Serendipity Arts {Virtual} Grant is back for the second edition, inviting applications for digital projects across all disciplines responding to the interweb as a site. The Grant would be awarded to one collectives, group, duo, or collaborations to develop a project adapted to the digital space with funding up to INR 1 lakh. Projects have to be interdisciplinary in nature, inviting collaborative projects, and will be hosted on the Serendipity Arts website.

The SAF Arts Journalism Grant seeks to provide support worth 1 lakh to an early- or mid-career journalist/reporter in an effort to develop a body of reportage around creative communities/ practices in the subcontinent. Situated as we are within an ecosystem that is more saturated with initiatives for critical and curatorial writing, this Grant hopes to address a seeming lacuna in opportunities for accessible arts journalism, to drive greater interest and public stakeholdership in the arts. The awardee will be chosen from a pool of candidates nominated by the Jury.

The Serendipity Arts Classical Arts Mentorship Grant offers financial support to practitioners in the field of Indian Classical music and dance who wish to train under a mentor for a period of six months. The model for training follows the traditional teacher-student (Guru-Shishya) format of knowledge transmission and practice whereby the student learns and resides under the tutelage of the mentor for the period of their education. The goal of the grant is to facilitate the enhancement of the applicant’s practice either through further pursuance of their discipline or through the acquisition of allied art practices and skills within the Indian Classical music/dance traditions.

Serendipity Arts Foundation and Les Rencontres d’Arles announced the biggest photography, video and new media grant, supported by the Institut français en Inde named the Serendipity Arles Grant, with the shared purpose of promoting cultural practices in South Asia.

Serendipity Arts Production Grant for Independent Musicians is for all independent music creators across different genres to support the process of creating, recording, producing and releasing and/or presenting new music. The grant will be awarded to bands, duos, groups or individual independent musicians with a grant of up to INR 1,00,000.

Serendipity Arts Foundation and Les Rencontres d’Arles announced the biggest photography, video and new media grant, supported by the Institut français en Inde named the Serendipity Arles Grant, with the shared purpose of promoting cultural practices in South Asia.

In 2020, the Serendipity Arts Foundation and Les Rencontres d’Arles announced the biggest lens-based media grant, supported by the Institut français en Inde, with the shared purpose of promoting cultural practices in the South Asian region. The winner of the previous grant, Sathish Kumar, was awarded the grant to develop and showcase his proposed project, Town Boy at Les Rencontres d’Arles in July 2022.

In 2020, the Serendipity Arts Foundation and Les Rencontres d’Arles announced the biggest lens-based media grant, supported by the Institut français en Inde, with the shared purpose of promoting cultural practices in the South Asian region. The winner of the previous grant, Sathish Kumar, was awarded the grant to develop and showcase his proposed project, Town Boy at Les Rencontres d’Arles in July 2022.

Serendipity Arts Residency 2023 Image credit: Aabshaar Wakhloo, Ghumne Chale at Serendipity Arts Festival 2022 TIMELINES KEY INFORMATION Application Deadline: May 7, 2023 at 11:59 pm IST Location: Serendipity Arts Foundation, Defence Colony, New Delhi ABOUT Serendipity Arts announces the OPEN CALL for the Serendipity Arts Residency 2023, an annual three-month artists residency based in […]

Serendipity Arts Residency 2022 KEY INFORMATION Residency Duration: 1st July – 16th September 2022 Location: Serendipity Arts Foundation, Defence Colony, New Delhi ABOUT Serendipity Arts Foundation is delighted to announce the OPEN CALL for Serendipity Arts Residency 2022, an annual three-month artists residency based in New Delhi. Applications are invited from emerging artists working across […]

Serendipity Arts Residency 2022 Coming Soon! Stay tuned for the Open Call.

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.

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.

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.

A workshop conducted by Cie Yan Duyvendak, in collaboration with Pro Helvetia New Delhi, which took place in Goa, in May 2019.

The third edition of Dharti Arts Residency showcased the works of 4 artists, including a sound artist and a performance artist.

The second edition of Dharti Arts Residency saw the artists working closely with a critic in residence.

2017 saw the first ever group of Dharti residents come together at Serendipity Arts Foundation's studio space in New Delhi for a three-month long residency.

Four performers recreated life moments of various street vendors framing the street as a performance space, sharing personal narratives, conversations around food and their aspirations.

Shiv Yin is a rare performance bringing China and India together through dance and music.

An extension of the 2016 project, Sandhi included renowned musicians accompanied by four dancers.

About the elephant is an exploration of our place and purpose within civilization.

An evening of contemporary – classical music with original songs by the band Shadow and Light, in collaboration with three gifted musicians.

Over the last few years, there have been many determined and talented young amateurs who have used unique platforms to connect directly with new audiences and have bypassed mainstream vehicles such as films and recording labels. This project curated by Ranjit Barot created a platform to showcase such talent.

A Night in Harlem is a journey through the birthplace of some of the most important music ever to be created – music that was the origin of most contemporary music that we listen to today.

An interactive sonic wall that intended to surprise the viewer by revealing sounds from the city of Delhi.

Shadow Play was an exploration of the technique of shadow puppets as intricate works of craft, illustrators of narratives and metaphors for good and bad.

Form, Metaphor, Memory showcased works by the awardees of the Goan Artists’ Grant, instituted by Serendipity Arts Foundation in 2019.

The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) organised a session titled The Story Tellers in September 2018. This session engaged with art practices that have histories of working outside the confines of the art gallery or related sanctioned ‘white cube’ spaces, seeking more direct and immediate contact with their audiences.

The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), in collaboration with Serendipity Arts Foundation (SAF), organized a month long course, titled ‘The Moving Image: A Course Exploring Light, Movement and Narrative’ that ran from September 11 to October 13, 2017, culminating in an Open Display of the resulting artworks on October 14 that continued till October 27, 2017.

Organised by the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) in 2019, this course was designed to explore site-specific practice and its relation to process, research and experimentation.

A series of informal film screenings to be held annually in March at C340, Defence Colony.

People's Music, an interdisciplinary exhibition exploring the intersections between community, resistance and music, was first showcased at Serendipity Arts Festival 2017. A reconstructed version of it was brought to Space 340 in April 2018.

A book launch and discussion around Photo Peshawar by Lukas Birk & Sean Foley, published by PIX and Mapin.

The five-day workshop at GHS Keri reached out to middle school students from GHS Keri, Morlem and Surla. It was conducted by a classical dancer and a martial artist, combining perspectives from different kinds of traditional practices and ways of relating to daily life and nature.

Camarabhat located in Talegaon, adjoining Panjim, is home to a vibrant third-generation migrant community. The 3-month project brought together children aged between 10 and 13 years into a continuing engagement with theatre, music, and movement.

The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) and Serendipity Arts Foundation (SAF) will came together to collaborate on two exciting art workshops for children, held in Goa – Anatomy of a Dot, conducted by Nilanjana Nandy, and Stories on the Wall, conducted by Ruchin Soni.

In collaboration with Junoon, Arts Encounter was brought to Goa for the first time in November 2017. To conduct this workshop with a school in Goa, Junoon brought on board Keli a Mumbai-based organisation that introduces Kathakali to children, and works to support, sustain and encourage this classical heritage.

Serendipity Arts Foundation, Asia Art Archive and HH Art Spaces collaborated to present three new platforms that stage performance art.

SENSES introduction SENSES has focused on incremental inclusion and access for varied audiences. SENSES is India’s first-ever ‘accessible and inclusive outreach program’ curated for persons with special needs, for a multidisciplinary arts festival. Over the span of four years, Access For ALL has been able to reach out to over 700+ children with special needs […]

India Art Fair 2023 Image courtesy – Serendipity Arts Foundation at India Art Fair 2022 Projects FOOD LAB the cases of missing vegetables Project by Akash Muralidharan COOK AND SEE The concept for the ‘Cook and See’ challenge arose from the desire to find out why several vegetables from Samaithu Paar (A Tamil vegetarian cookbook […]

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 […]

Serendipity Arts Foundation participated for the first time ever at India Art Fair in 2019 with an institutional booth focussing on performance and research.

An evening of Rajasthani Sufiana tradition featuring Mir Mukhtiar Ali

Dhamaal, a celebration of drumming traditions from India was first showcased at SAF 2018. As a launch event to SAF 2019 in the heart of Delhi's Central Park, Dhamaaal kickstarted the lead up to the festival in December with an evening of drums and music.

The launch event for SAF 2017 which took place at the beautiful Royal Opera House in Mumbai showcased a unique classical music performance, reinterpreting archival information both in terms of its musical format as well as its visual presentation. The music renditions pay tribute to the manner in which artistes adapted their presentations for emerging formats like recording technology. Living Traditions was first performed at SAF 2016.

A part of The Charpai Project, showcased at Serendipity Arts Festival 2017 was brought to India Design & Home Décor Week 2019.

Those who missed out on the Goa edition of 2016 got a glimpse of it in the Delhi edition in 2017. An intensive schedule of exhibitions and performances was programmed for audiences throughout the 11 days of the festival at Bikaner House, Delhi.

The Dark Lord was a launch event for SAF 2018, taking place at the Royal Opera House, Mumbai. The performance is a dance/theatre experience that takes viewers on a journey through the images of the many seekers of Lord Krishna.

At SAF in 2018, apart from the established and more formal theatre venues, we attempted to bring theatre into Goan homes.