INTIMATE ART
Photography is reimagined and the frames shift to newer vistas at the recently concluded Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa
The Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa took a bold look at private spaces through a camera lens
At first there are the kites. White kites next to a window. It seems they are yearning to fly away. A blue sky outside is a metaphor too. The kites are part of Indu Antony’s exploration of memories and dreams. Exploring Carl Jung’s theory of the Personal Unconscious, she traces the way memories get ‘boxed’ and their eventual resurfacing in unexpected ways. The idea was to explore these ‘boxes’ using oral history, visuals, objects and performances. In this project she tells the story of a specific personal memory that resurfaced after 14 years.
At Adil Shah Palace in Goa, one of the venues for the third edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival, there was a bold attempt to look at current photography practices and find out what holds them together and how the camera has turned to private spaces.
“It combines strong elements of sweat smells, images, kites woven with the artist's hair with her words. Indu has a practice of expressing deep personal experiences through her multimedia works,” says Ravi Agarwal, a Delhi-based photographer and the curator for Intimate Documents for Serendipity. For him, the Arts Festival is helping bridge gaps between high art, folk, craft, tradition and contemporary works.
There is a mournful quest for closure at the Adil Shah Palace in Goa. A child’s drawings of the mountains alongside replicas of those shot by Delhi-based Chandan Gomes.
Gomes’ work is almost reportage. It was while in a hospital in Jaipur where he had been commissioned to do a project that he stumbled upon a book of drawings in a hospice known as Avedna Ashram, where he would often go to take photos. The book carried no name. Sometimes all you need is a trigger of absence, of intrigue and Gomes held on to the book and tried to find the child but couldn’t and then he left for the mountains and spent the
next eight months taking photos that were inspired by the child’s drawings. On the walls at Serendipity were intimate portraits of a stranger’s search for a girl; a journey that combined text, drawings and photos in an attempt to reimagine photography. “Gomes has a process-based practice of tracking objects and traces of people,” says Agarwal. Like Gomes, Antony’s work “Uncle Vincent” explores a personal narrative and space of sexual exploitation of a child by her uncle.
The eight-day long festival served as a platform for multi-disciplinary collaboration and cultural innovation. “Our approach was to celebrate the diversity of arts,” says SmritiRajgarhia-Bhatt, the director of Serendipity Arts Festival. “We always have a bunch of curators unlike Kochi-Muziris Biennale which has only one curator and is more institutionalised.”
Devised by Sunil Kant Munjal, chairman of Hero Enterprises, in 2016, the festival this year also responded to the politics of otherness and turns its gaze towards the marginalised with Queen Size, a theatre project curated by Atul Kumar in response to Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Queen Size is a choreographic exploration of the intimacy between two men played out on a charpai. In addition, Lavani Queens...
Sangte Aika, curated by Ranjana Dave was a performance that looked at gender with Lavani, exploring questions such as: Who is a Lavani dancer? Can Lavani be performed by men and women? What effect will it have on the 'male gaze?’
For a week, Goa became a destination for art lovers trying to engage with different practices. Now, the kites are gone but the memories remain. And so does the hope for another edition next year and what it will showcase.