ON-SITE: A workshop exploring process, dialogue and experimentation
about
The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, in collaboration with Serendipity Arts Foundation, hosted young artists for a five-week course from September 10 until October 20, 2019 through an open call, titled ON-SITE: A Workshop exploring process, dialogue and experimentation.
The course was designed to explore site-specific practice and its relation to process, research and experimentation. Casting aside the more conventional definition of intervention from the ‘outside’, site-specific practice today is a more complex engagement of generating a public sphere through different models of collective engagement whether of relationalism or social dialogue.
The intensive programme opens up possibilities of conceptualising and making through the process of research, reading and experimenting with mediums through collaborations and exchanges.
Like the previous two editions conducted in 2017 and 2018, this third edition of the course is also directed at giving students insights into how artists turn to the city into an extended studio, mining various resources, individuals and forming their own support structures. The emphasis through all the modules will remain on exercises and explorations carried out by the participants.
The objective of this course was not just to explore the technical skills devised by the respective mentors/artists, but also to create an immersive environment of learning and peer sharing, and engage with the larger conceptual questions these practices throw up. There were additional sessions with invited guest practitioners. The sessions were designed such that the outcome of each of the sessions led towards the making of a display. To culminate the process, there was an Open House event at the end of the work-period to share and discuss the works and ideas generated by the participants.
Modules
Process-oriented Strategies | Peter Rösel
Peter Rösel’s module created an awareness and working method for developing and trusting the artists’ own process-oriented strategies. Working in a process-oriented manner is about accepting that the outcome is also a surprise and that mistakes and errors that happen on the way are welcome. Participants worked through the module to generate documentation of their own processes.
Site-specific Art: Co-habiting Differences | Sanchayan Ghosh
Sanchayan Ghosh’s module on site-specific art practice engaged with the notion of site as contested entity of multi-layered, nomadic traits of live-in and move-in relationships that
determine the identity of a site. It explored notions of self-determination, de-territorialization
that a site constantly encounters and the reciprocal performative relationship that is inherent in the practice of a site.
Reading Site | Vidya Shivadas
Vidya Shivadas’s module focused on a series of discussions and interactions with practitioners and key texts to understand, what scholar Miwon Kwon described as, the ‘grounds of site-specificity’. The module explored the interdisciplinary nature of site-specific practices and the multiple ways in which contemporary practitioners are mobilizing the idea of site today.
Images courtesy FICA
Mentors
Peter Rösel, Sanchayan Ghosh and Vidya Shivadas
Course Facilitator
Krishnapriya CP
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Ankan Dutta, Dhrubajit Sarma, Gyanwant Yadav, Maksud Ali Mondal, Selvam P, Shikha Sreenivas, Shweta Sharma, Tanaya Rao Raj, Umesh Singh and V Prabhu.
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