An unprecedented bonanza of free, easily accessible and seriously good exhibitions in the state capital supplu another reminder that Goa has everything to be an important international cultural centre, except responsible governance and competent heritage management. This is art amidst the wreckage, with busted-up pavements in half-abandoned roadworks, and omnipresent visual pollution from the repellent casinos. Do not look away, however. There is plenty to make you think between the extraordinary cornucopia of Serendipity Arts Festival and what’s on display at the Fundação Oriente in Fontainhas, with Angela Ferrão’s biting social commentary just down the road at Gallery Gitanjali as well as this.generation at Sunaparanta in Altinho, which its curator Srinivas Mangipudi describes as “an exhibition of code-based practices.”
One of the ways this moment is interesting is how these exhibitions exist in almost parallel worlds on the same tiny stretch of the Mandovi riverfront. It’s a tribute to all the organizers that everything fits together city-wide, in genuinely complementary fashion. But there are also more fundamental questions that apply to what happens in these same locations the rest of the year: what is meaningful public art in an urban environment that is increasingly hostile to the public, and where the space for free expression shrinks further year after year? And what about the state’s responsibilities towards Goa’s heritage – how can it be in 2023 there is still no public museum, no permanent collection, no way for young artists to experience the physical presence of even one great painting from the likes of Vasudeo Gaitonde and Francis Newton Souza?
These are vexing questions, with only a few obvious answers, but their lingering impress is why the exhibition of the Fundação Oriente Visual Arts Award 2023 makes such interesting viewing. You can see the work of very young artists right next to superb 100-year-old portraits by António Xavier Trindade (1870-1935), the pioneer of the Bombay School and “Rembrandt of the East.” This son of Sanguem, the father of five notoriously feisty and independent daughters, possessed an unusual capacity to depict turn-of-the-20th century Indian women with empathy and agency. It’s marvellous to turn from his 1925 masterpiece Miss Ferns – A Writer to Ramona Dias’s equally compelling Self-Portrait with Flowers (2021), which the painter tells us is about “the question of what comes next in the creative journey.”
Fundação Oriente is headquartered in Portugal – the once and forever bête noire of an extremist fringe in Goa despite stellar relations between New Delhi and Lisbon – but there can be no doubt about its outstanding support to many different aspects of culture in India’s smallest state. The current exhibition is an excellent example: 120 artworks were entered into competition for this popular annual prize, mostly home-grown talent that has no other outlet. Many works here strike deep chords: Satyam Vivek Malhar’s haunting nightscape Rakhandar-I, Sanayvi Naik’s anguished No Man’s Land (based on a traumatic incident when the artist’s beloved pet dog was callously shot) and Rajaram Naik’s stunning ganjifa-style game board based on the life of Dashavatar performer Bunty Kambli.
Meanwhile, up at Altinho, the best-ever Sunaparanta annual exhibition testifies that beautifully located arts centre has hit its stride and maximising the potential it always possessed. this.generation is both super-interesting and still developing, with activities, performances and other offshoots planned throughout the next four months. There are some intriguing artworks included, including the first-ever physical representation of the algorithmic Every Icon by John Simon Jr, and very beautiful hand drawings by Sidharth Gosavi that enliven one of the side rooms. Centrepiece is Climate Recipes, co-curated by Mangipudi and Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, one of the best recent art projects we have seen in Goa in recent years, which manages to speak directly to our moment. I liked how Isheta Salgaocar – who now helms Sunaparanta’s impressive all-woman team - put it in the lovely little book published alongside: “[the curators] have begun a movement collecting an archive of wisdom…It is a new beginning that will continue to evolve and regenerate as we seek knowledge, answers and hope on the future of humanity.”
Climate Recipes is what we want and need from art and artists at this fraught juncture. This is rich engagement with crucial questions, but more signal and less noise. The curators explain that “we set out on a research expedition in Goa to gather what we referred to as climate recipes. The form of the recipe spoke to us since it felt like an intimate, everyday instruction that held the potential to improvise and generate new knowledge. After conversations with environmentalists, foragers, academic, urban planners, eco-architects, chefs, farmers, and others, we collated recipes from their lived experiences of the environment. These recipes are entry points for an adaptable life suggesting different forms of creating, listening, cooking, grieving, training, building and loving.”
The multiplicity of voices and viewpoints in Climate Recipes gives the project shape-shifting universality, and precisely that characteristic – but scaled up to mind-boggling – makes Serendipity one of the most impressive displays of Indian soft power anywhere. This year there are 10 curators – look out especially for Thomas Zacharias in Culinary Arts, Quasar Thakore Padamsee in Theatre, and Anjana Somany and Sandeep Sanguru in Craft – plus another 60 odd special projects and collaborations in a dozen different venues from Samba Square to the Santa Monica Jetty, in the newly renovated Old PWD building and the recently reopened Kala Academy. According to its press release earlier this week, “the festival is supported by the Government of Goa, the Corporation of The City of Panaji, the Directorate of Art and Culture, Goa, the Entertainment Society of Goa, the Goa Tourism Department, Panaji Smart City and the Goa Forest Department.”
Everyone will have an individual approach and appreciation of Serendipity, because the scale, size and ambition of the festival allows it to be many things to different people. For my part, I am looking forward to Postcards from Goa, “a commissioned production directed by Vikram Phukan, that seeks to excavate stories that contextualize the queer experience in Goa. and retrofit it to locations in Panjim, along a scenic and culturally resonant walking trail” and also Synaesthetic Notations curated by Veerangana Solanki, which “explores the image as an arrival and departure point with sound as the crux of the experience of reading/deciphering images.” There’s also the sheer pleasure – and serendipity, certainly – of lingering in places made user-friendly by the festival, where you can relax to enjoy the city in ways that are impossible the rest of the year.
That, of course, brings us back to those troublesome fundamental questions. Why is it impossible to enjoy the city in these same ways the rest of the year? What happens to state support – and public appetite – for the arts in all the remaining months? Whose interests are served by this pattern, and who is left out? In this regard, Angela Ferrão’s bracing and caustic exhibition of illustrations at Gallery Gitanjali is an essential antithesis. The Univited is rooted in the native experience of Tourism Goa, “rich and complex and resilient” in ways that do not compute at all with the reckonings of most visitors. Those ideas are also central to the terrific little comic book that Ferrão co-authored with graphic designer Maria Vanessa de Sa and US-based professor R. Benedito Ferrão (no relation to the artist), The Uninvited: Goa and the Parties not Meant for its People.
You get the gist in the title itself. With catastrophic effect to Goa’s environment, culture and society, the state is perverted wholescale “for the purpose of entertainment for others.” In an interview with the news site at his university (it’s William & Mary in Virginia), Prof Ferrão explained that “there are many art festivals in Goa, but they rarely feature the work of Goan artists. There is no state repository of Goan art in Goa, so one cannot go to an art museum in Goa of Goan art. You could go to a local gallery, or you could go to a one-off exhibition, but there really is no sense of Goan art history. Angela’s work is important in its own right, but it’s also part of a longer tradition amongst Goan artists. And I think having an exhibition is good, but having a printed publication is also very important, because that then works as a more permanent record.”