A major highlight of the eighth edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa was the exhibition, Turning: On Field and Work, curated by Vidya Shivadas, author, curator and director, The Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), focusing on artistic research. Set up in 2007, FICA promotes a continuous dialogue between the arts and the public through education and public art projects. For Turning: On Field and Work, Shivadas brought together as many as 18 artists and institutions to the Old GMC Complex in Panaji. One of the focal points of the exhibition was making the long, painstaking research of artists during the creative process of works, accessible to the public. Among the artists at the exhibition were Benitha Perciyal, Sanchayan Ghosh, Niroj Satpathy and Amol Patil and included collectives like the newly-formed Panjeri Artists’ Union from West Bengal and more than two-decade-old Britto Arts Trust from Dhaka, Bangladesh. Shivadas also included powerful projects like the Ambedkar Age Digital Bookmobile by artists Smita Rajmane and Somnath Waghmare from Maharashtra. The two artists documented Ambedkarite singers in small town and rural Maharashtra to shed light on the traditions of songwriting, performances and poetry against caste exploitation and untouchability and have turned it into a portable archive in a trunk. Shivadas talks with Faizal Khan about the curatorial philosophy and the works:

What is the curatorial philosophy of Turning: On Field and Work?

How would you describe the majorelements of the exhibition?

A strand in the exhibition consists of offerings from artists who engage with the ground—with soil and land, building their artistic explorations from materials and processes that are part of such lifeworlds. They immerse themselves in forms and modes of agrarian practices, indigenous knowledge systems, the dynamics of rural and urban sites, and engage with questions of scarcity, abundance, value, resource, and sustainability.

What has caused a change in India in understanding the long, painstaking research by artists for their works?

Over the past few years, the idea of artistic research has become quite important to address globally. In our context also we see this. We have had a deep interest in research among artists for a long time, but somehow this was never foregrounded in the presentation of art, by institutions and in many cases artists themselves. Today, artists are open to thinking about research. They make deep enquiries and also equally question methodologies and ways of researching. In the exhibition, you see many levels of engagement which are strongly grounded in different sites and time periods. There are so many materials and so many different ways of creating. Many projects engage with the archive as well. There is an obsessive and eccentric collation from the landfills of Delhi grained from the artistic research of Niroj Satpathy, which comes from his own experiences of working with Delhi Solid Waste Management for five years and the exhumation of the early history of a women’s organisation in Assam, called the Tezpur Mahila Samiti, founded in 1919. Also Artist Amol Pati’s moving video performance based on the real-life story of a sanitation worker who skated through the streets of Mumbai holding a radio and songs that arise from the rhythms of women tile makers in Bolpur, Santiniketan, reinventing the emancipatory potential of labour and tools.

What was the selection criteria of artists and institutions to represent the importance of exhibiting artistic research?

I was selecting works for this show and thinking of choreography and conversation between them. Many of these projects have been part of FICA’s work through grants and programmes. In other cases, it was relating to amazing projects I saw in the past year which fit into the exhibition theme and were important to highlight. Another aspect was to allow new commissions, collaborations and exchanges to emerge with the support of the festival given that this is a space for experimentation in artistic production as much as it is about making art and cultural expression available to audiences.

Faizal Khan is a freelancer