Why India’s artists and audiences are craving fresh, fearless festivals that support new voices

A new wave of young, bold artists is reshaping India’s art scene with new perspectives and experimental mediums. And the Serendipity Arts Festival is providing the platform

Jino J Ampakkadu could hardly have imagined that a “simple and stupid” idea he dreamt up in early 2023 would become an actual “contemporary human experience project.” Known as Table and Stools, it is now travelling to literature and theatre festivals across  India. For the past 20-odd-months,  the 24-year-old advertising professional and his entirely Gen-Z teams in Chennai and Bengaluru have set up a wooden table and two stools at beaches and parks, inviting strangers for one-on-one conversations. The result? A takeaway involving  murukku—and, perhaps, some catharsis. 

“While having conversations, we [usually] end up talking a lot, and forget to listen, because we’re already preparing a reply in our heads,” says Ampakkadu, fresh from an appearance at a theatre festival in Mumbai, and about a fortnight away from debuting at the Serendipity Arts Festival (SAF) in Panjim, Goa. “But listening can be the greatest form of respect that you can offer someone. At festivals, we shift the narrative. To the people who’ve come here to listen, explore, watch, we say: Who is listening to you? Come tell us your stories,” he adds. 

Table and Stools, a listening community based out of Chennai, is just one of more than 200 projects vying for your attention across 15 venues in Panjim at the ninth edition of SAF. As art increasingly breaks free from traditional spaces, it is finding new ways to meet people where they are—both physically and emotionally. Amid an increasingly crowded cultural calendar of art, music, film, theatre, and literature festivals in India, SAF has managed to carve out a distinct niche for itself.

But, judging from the rapturous expressions on visitors’ faces who walk around the Old GMC Complex—one of the venues—during the week-long festival and the gushing compliments on online fora, SAF (or ‘Serendipity’) has made its mark as a public arts festival intent on showcasing culture with a lowercase ‘c’. 

A new generation of artistes

“Serendipity has always considered itself a multidisciplinary festival, which is an abstract concept,” says Quasar Thakore Padamsee, curator for this year’s theatre segment. For this edition of what he describes as a “hangout festival,” along with co-curator Sankar Venkateswaran, he issued an open call for theatre presentations and commissions. The response was overwhelming, with nearly 600 applications that surprised him with their breadth—both in number and concept. 

From the festival calendar for this year, Padamsee highlights Item by the Ahmedabad-based Arpita Dhagat as an “absolute riot,” describes Beloved as “a celebration of queerness,” and adds, “Who doesn’t know Mallika Taneja?” in reference to her work Do You Know This Song?. Enthusiastically, he lists several others.. “There’s a new generation of theatremakers, with new ways of telling stories,” he says. 

One such story comes from what Padamsee calls “the weirder commissions” set in the Control Room of The Directorate of Accounts in Panjim. The House Blue is a narrative theatre performance in which photographer Mrityunjay Kumar explores identity, survival, and relationships through photographs. Meanwhile, at the preview room of the ESG Building, Nitish Jain’s Shahi Tukda offers a sensorial dramatic experience that delves into themes of tenderness and caregiving. 

Going against the grain 

A significant number of the projects and artists at this year’s edition defy traditional definitions and categorisations. At the Old GMC Building, artists selected by Delhi-based contemporary art duo Thukral & Tagra, engaged in Multiplay, a site-specific experiment to “blur the boundaries between the audiences and artist, through participation, interaction and writing proposals to ask: What is an exhibition?” Nearby, at the Food Lab, The Mushroom Keepers examines the intricate relationships between fungi and Meghalaya’s Khasi and Garo communities through a film screening. 

Innovation continues at the Kala Academy’s rehearsal room, with  The Game of Whispers, an interactive and generative video game by Parag Mittal. The project “uses large language models and AI [Artificial Intelligence] to detect the way that misinformation spreads via a simulation of the Mughal-era succession story of Shah Jahan,” explains producer and composer Sanaya Ardeshir aka Sandunes, who, along with Krishna Jhaveri, co-founded the transmedia project focused on activated listening and field recordings called Ears To The Ground and even created the game’s music.  

“We both seem to have one foot in the music and the other in this space,” observes Ardeshir, reflecting how India’s  arts landscape has evolved over the past decade. It’s within this context that the duo will also present The Medium, an instrument-based interactive installation derived from an ouija board, as a part of arts curator Veerangana Solanki’s exhibit A Haptic Score at the Old GMC Building. The installation explores what it means for  touch to be the last of our five senses to attenuate as we age.

“Last year, we got pulled into an art fair through a young collectors’ programme. That project was the precursor to this one; it marked our first steps in object-making, thinking about sound for a space that was outside the paradigm of performance. In a sense, that was directed at people like us who hadn’t so far made headway into the art world,” says Ardeshir. 

Experimentation is a hallmark at SAF, a sentiment echoed by Avinash Kumar, founder of the media arts festival Eyemyth and a Goa resident. “SAF allows a lot more experimentation than other festivals would,” he says. Eyemyth will make its debut at SAF this year, presenting a response to Solanki’s exhibit through productions that blend electronic music and visual arts. At the Directorate of Accounts Building, musicians including  Murthovic, Spryk, Big Fat Minimalist, Aaron Miles Pereira, Vinay Khare, and TAHSKA will collaborate, experiment, and improvise sensorial experiences with spatial sound and 180-degree projections. “A lot of artists are trying to create something that’s a lot more avant garde than they would for a mainstream festival or electronic music venue.” 

Meanwhile, Anusha Murthy and Elizabeth Yorke of the food systems collective Edible Issues are also taking an avant-garde approach to exploring the future of food and human survival in times of crisis—not limited to  pandemics. “Through the work we do, we are asking especially urban consumers to consider questions like: who shapes the way we grow and eat food? Who feeds us? Who feeds those who feed us?,” explains Yorke about curating the Food Lab at SAF this year. 

“When people think about food and futures now, it seems very sci-fi. In some cases we’ve played with that lens, but it’s also about how we weave in our own culture and heritage into that narrative,” says Murthy. This exploration unfolds  not just in talks and meals, but through workshops, foraging walks, film screenings, plays, and even a fiction-writing session inspired by food led by Dhruv Sehgal.

Bridging the past and the present 

Akshay Mahajan and Lina Vincent’s ongoing project Goa Familia examines the state’s evolving narratives through its archivists—artists, creators, and everyday individuals documenting lives offline and on digital platforms like Instagram. Their installation,  Archive for Potential(Goan) Futures, showcases works like  Kirtika Menon’s photographs of her adopted village of Moira; Pantaleo Fernandes’ multi-media exploration of traditional livelihoods of Goa; and Instagram dispatches such as Lion of Goa. “They’re reflections of not just the past, but also Goa in the present and—we theorise in this exhibition—that they’re blueprints for the future,” explains Mahajan. 

Projects like Goa Familia are emblematic of Serendipity Arts Foundation’s commitment to fostering experimentation through public art programmes, grants, and residencies. “Festivals like these are different from art fairs—which have their place, of course—because there are more avenues for experimentation. You have a wide mix of people, artists, and interesting space to meet and exchange. They are perhaps pillars of the emerging arts,” adds Mahajan. 

This experimental spirit extends to music, where curators Bickram Ghosh and Zubin Balaporia focus on bridging tradition and modernity.  Ghosh blends Indian classical music with contemporary genres, orchestrating this year’s River Raga cruise concert on the Mandovi to highlight ragas like Sivaranjini.  Balaporia, meanwhile, reimagines Goa’s Fado music by incorporating  modern instruments such as a string quartet, drums, and saxophones alongside the Portuguese guitar and rhythm guitar. “That’s the unique thing about a festival like Serendipity,” says Nadia Rebelo, the fadista who headlines the Sempre Fado concert. “You see ideas and concepts through all the art forms. Some of them make you question the very nature of the art,” she adds. “Every artist defies what they believe to be a standard so that they can create something new. For someone like me, it's a think-tank to challenge my notions and to create something new,” continues Rebelo. This spirit of innovation is bolstered by Serendipity's lack of overt branding and its excellent use of public and heritage spaces in Panjim.

“It’s always interesting to see people [at the Festival] who you would otherwise not see in a gallery space,” says Mahajan. “Its multi-art [nature] means you might come for one thing and leave with something completely different.” He notes that some visitors return year after year, becoming contributors or finding their own stories reflected in the projects. “Those little moments are almost…serendipitous.”

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