On popular demand and immense response from the Goan public, the exhibitions at the Old Goa Institute of Management have been extended for public viewing until January 15, 2019. The 2019 edition of Serendipity Arts Festival came to an end on Sunday 22nd December, following a huge turnout across venues during the festival. Over 100 dynamic projects showcasing the visual, performing and culinary arts, across 12 iconic venues in Panaji, Co-Presented by Havells and Powered by HDFC ERGO & GMR, the festival transformed the city into a vibrant cultural space with multiple exhibitions, performances and immersive art experiences involving over 1500 regional and international artists.
Announcing the extension of the exhibitions at Old GIM, Smriti Rajgarhia, Director, Serendipity Arts Foundation and Festival said, “The fourth edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival was highly appreciated our visitors, both local and from outside Goa. We have decided to extend the dates of our exhibition at the Old Goa Institute of Management and keep it open until the 15th of January 2020. We have received a lot of requests from the public, and we want them to continue experiencing the artwork from different corners of the sub-continent and the world for a longer period at Old GIM.”
Highlights of the exhibitions at Old GIM include Rahaab Allana’s trans-media curatorial project titled Look, Stranger!, which draws on the aesthetic ideologies and approaches to image-making and materiality as cultivated by the Bauhaus, which celebrates 100 years in 2019. The project traveled across South Asia (and its diaspora) in search of emerging lens-based practitioners working with photography, and new media to explore questions of community and detachment, belonging and place. Echoing the eponymous Auden poem, Look, Stranger! is an opportunity to explore evolving relationships between the self and the world through experimental forms.
As part of the Special Projects, Nancy Adajania’s exhibition titled Counter-Canons Counter-Culture: Alternate Histories of Indian Art that demonstrate the rich, living heritage of art-making in postcolonial India that had little or nothing to do with this dominant narrative. The exhibition is based on her argument that a substantial but unknown ‘pre-history’ exists for new media art practice in India, and that new media practice did not simply emerge out of a void or as an unprecedentedly new cultural phenomenon in the 1990s. It will show how these protean cultural energies are articulated through photography, film, music and immersive transmedia experiences.
Virtuality As Reality curated by Jessica Castex & Odile Burluraux includes a selection of videos from the collection of Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. The project reflects the idea of virtuality that irrigates ever more strongly the daily life. This virtualisation of human societies questioned by artists is creating new territories; it is transforming the being and its relationship to the world. Through the exhibition, we can foresee the portrait of a generation of artists qualified as ‘Digital natives’ who have integrated the use of the web and social networks into their practices. Their speculations, their questions sketch out scenarios that are sometimes exciting, sometimes worrying and seem to alert us on the future of the connected human being.
With its fourth edition, the Festival placed considerable emphasis on research-based, rigorous visual arts projects, exploring a variety of mediums and practices, offering opportunities for emerging artists and promoting interdisciplinary explorations.