Serendipity Arts Festival: A splash of art in Goa

Billed as India’s largest multidisciplinary cultural extravaganza, the Serendipity Arts Festival of Panjim has been an unmissable annual ritual on the Goan artistic calendar since 2016. This writer was in Panjim recently for its ninth iteration.

And while the curtains may have fallen on yet another edition of the fest, the buzz in Goa is only getting started. With Christmas and New Year around the corner, the charming Portuguese-era capital city of Goa is abuzz with activity and anticipation.

The festival’s founder-patron Sunil Kant Munjal could hardly have imagined that what began as a modest initiative to support creative endeavours and unify different disciplines such as visual arts, theatre, music, film, food, and performing arts would blossom into one of the standout events that attracts families, men, women, students, and younger audiences from all corners of India and beyond.

“The name ‘Serendipity’ was borrowed from my wife who used to have a bookstore by that name at the Claridges Hotel in New Delhi. When the hotel shut down for maintenance for three years the bookstore was affected, too. But we kept the name,” Munjal tells Wknd. He is the chairman of Hero Enterprise and one of the most prominent Indian entrepreneurs but he’s also a man deeply passionate about art and culture. The festival offers free entry to most of its events, driven by his commitment to making art accessible to all. “India has such a rich cultural heritage from classical times to the present,” says Munjal. “Unfortunately, it was confined to elite circles. We wanted to change that by not only bringing this knowledge back into the popular conversation but also connecting diverse communities on a common platform.”

The seven-day festival this time was more ambitious and bigger in scale than ever before, with 14 lead curators given the task of conjuring a wide array of events held across different venues in Panjim. Delhi-based artist duo Thukral and Tagra were one of the curators, who conceptualised Multiplay — an interactive and immersive experience that invited visitors to reflect and remake the traditional ways of seeing and understanding art.

Best known for their pioneering practice that straddles fine arts, new media, gaming, technology and pop culture, Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra’s curation emphasised the role of artists as facilitators and interlocutors, allowing the primary creators to step back for a moment and foster a dynamic relationship between the exhibition space, the ideas and artworks in them and the viewer instead. It seems Thukral and Tagra, affectionately nicknamed T&T by friends, have envisioned a scenario where different characters would be gathered in a room to engage in a creative argument.

Multiplay brought together more than 30 individuals and ideologies from different disciplines, from architects, filmmakers and artists to research collectives, environmentalists and graphic novelists.

As part of Multiplay, Himanshu Shani’s Indigo Flower urged visitors to wander through a canvas on the floor leaving behind a trail of indigo as they silently moved while the Kuwaiti research-based visual artist Ala Younis' Friendship Garden: Playgrounds was yet another creative expression which involved active people participation.

Younis’ work served as a reminder that the playground of the future, whatever form it may take, will be ultimately made by us. A more playful and yet, thought-provoking conceptual art could be found in Indian artist Shailesh BR’s Let's Make a Choice (Swayamvara), in which a machine or Artificial intelligence (AI) sought potential suitors among the thousands of walk-in audiences. The work explored the tensions between traditions, philosophy, and technology through satire. Thukral and Tagra are the founders of the creative lab Pollinator.io whose experimental project, Book Massage, handed out free massages with the condition that you to listen to an audiobook from one of the 10 featured authors, instantly helping turn this space into one of rest, healing, learning and introspection.

Outside the old GMC complex in Panjim, which serves as the beating heart of the Serendipity Arts Festival, you could hail a cab and if you were lucky, you could sit in one with billboards that said, Poems on the Move.

This was an artwork in motion. Hop into these cars and you would find six poets as companions, making your trip an adventure to remember.

This was Jafar Panahi’s Taxi Tehran transplanted from the busy bottlenecks of Iran’s capital city to the quaint, but equally crowded streets of Goa. “We had actually given this idea to Serendipity five-six years ago but it did not work out then. We wanted to do something like, ‘Performance in a car’. So, when they approached us to curate the ninth edition we decided to bring that idea back and make it work this time,” shares Sumir Thukral, on a walkthrough with wknd. In the context of Multiplay, both artists drew inspiration from cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan’s famous refrain, “The medium is the message.” Jiten explains, "With Multiplay, we thought of creating an infrastructure or a framework where we could push the limits of art, the way artists make art, and the way the audience perceives it. It’s like a tennis match; everyone is a participant. There is so much hate and discrimination in the world today, we felt compelled to cultivate an environment where we could provide an antidote to these hostilities and instead open up avenues for care, compassion, inclusivity, and innovation. For us, art can give us a lot to reflect on and provoke us to be better human beings.”

The Directorate of Accounts building — a 15th century historic government hub transformed into an arts space especially for the festival — bustled with excitement as audiences crammed in to catch a glimpse of Bhupen in Goa. Curated by the renowned Indian artist Gulammohammed Sheikh, this sprawling exhibition showcased the prolific range and provocative talent of Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003). It was a rare delight to see so many magnificent Khakhar masterpieces under one roof and what made the effort unprecedented was that the Baroda-based Gulammohammed Sheikh brought his sharp curatorial and scholarly lens to the works (ranging from ceramics, drawings, sculptures, prints and watercolours) of his late friend, offering fresh perspective to an artist who was much misunderstood in his own lifetime.

Also striking was the French artist-filmmaker Ange Leccia’s La mer allée avec le soleil/The Sea Goes With the Sun (2016). Supported by the French Institute in India, it was a nod to the 72-year-old Leccia’s Corsican youth, delving into conflicting themes of both beauty and violence.

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