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![India Foundation for the Arts](http://www.indiaifa.org/newsletter/edition22/images/masthead.jpg) |
Quarterly Newsletter Edition 22 |
January-March 2012 |
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Apply: Grants & Fellowships |
Fellowships
We invite applications for our Archival Fellowships, to be awarded to four artists/curators keen to enrich their practice through an engagement with archival research. Details. |
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Supporting IFA |
IFA’s influence, position and visibility in the arts world have grown fairly rapidly in the recent past, and with it, IFA’s responsibility to the arts. There are greater demands on us today. People look to us to address emerging needs and concerns in the arts. We need a facility that enables us to play this larger role. This is where we need your support. You can help us create a permanent home for the arts by contributing to our Capital Campaign and by spreading the word about this campaign among all your friends who care deeply about the future of the arts in India. Contributions start at just Rs 4,000 and are tax-deductible. Details. |
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Our fundraiser, August: Osage County, directed by Lillete Dubey on March 11, 2012, was a great success with Bangalore audiences. We would like to thank Amicorp, Louis Philippe and The Park Hotel for their unstinting support for the fundraiser. Connect with IFA to watch some of India’s prominent performers take to the stage to support the arts. |
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Learn about the Arts as you support them. Become a Friend of IFA. As a Friend, you will be contributing directly to philanthropy in the arts and encouraging the presence of the arts in public life. It starts at just Rs 2,500/- a year and your donation is tax-deductible. In return, you will receive exclusive access to IFA events, the ArtConnect magazine, and our annual reports. |
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Buy Now!
IFA Publications |
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IFA in your city |
You wouldn’t want to miss IFA in your city. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All events are public and free, unless otherwise stated.
The following events were held in different cities in the last three months: |
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BANGALORE |
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Grantee Presentation
Parenthetic Exercises: Archiving the Studio
By Akansha Rastogi
KHOJ International Artists’ Association—IFA’s nodal centre to facilitate curatorial practice.
March 1, 2012 |
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MUMBAI |
Community Engagement
IFA and Clark House Initiative: Supporting Arts Practice
Engagement with artists to help demystify the grant application process under the Extending Arts Practice programme.
March 13, 2012 |
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Festival
The IFA Festival, Mumbai
IFA launched its new office in Mumbai with a two-day festival at the Prithvi Theatre.
April 7 and 8, 2012 |
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JAMMU |
Workshop
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Curating Indian Visual Culture: Art in the Context of Conflicts
IFA in association with its nodal centre for curatorial theory—Association of Academics, Artists and Citizens for University Autonomy (ACUA), Vadodara—and the University of Jammu, organised a curatorial workshop to engage with the question of art, aesthetics and politics in the context of zones of conflict.
February 6 – 11, 2012 |
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PUNE |
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In the last quarter, IFA crossed an important milestone—the launch of its new office in Mumbai. After frequent requests from grantees, trustees, patrons, friends and other well-wishers to expand our base, we finally opened our doors to Mumbai on April 7 and 8, 2012 with a grand festival at the Prithvi Theatre. Anmol Vellani, Founder and Executive Director, explained the significance of this step in his speech at the press conference for the launch. “IFA has a strong association with this city. We have supported several grants to individuals and institutions based here. While supporting the arts is of prime importance to us, it is also important to raise funds to continue our work, for which we must expand our reach. Given the scale of our investment in Mumbai, we felt that if people saw the kind of work we were doing, they would want to support us. To which end, we plan to organise a series of events featuring our grantees, beginning with The IFA Festival, Mumbai.” We are grateful to Prithvi Theatre, Project 88, Art India and Mohile Parikh Centre (MPC), who will partner IFA to host these events in Mumbai. |
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Seen in this picture (from left to right) are Naseeruddin Shah, Jaithirth Rao, Jitish Kallat
and Sangita Jindal lighting floating candles to inaugurate the IFA Festival, Mumbai. |
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The Festival was inaugurated by actor Naseeruddin Shah along with Sangita Jindal, founder-chairperson, Jindal South West Foundation, actor Ratna Pathak Shah, artist Jitish Kallat, entrepreneur Jaithirth Rao, Anuradha Parikh, Managing Trustee, MPC, Shaila Parikh, Founder, MPC, filmmaker Sumantra Ghoshal, and Kunal Kapoor, Director, Prithvi Theatre.
At the launch Naseeruddin Shah was very vocal in his support for IFA’s initiative. “It is delightful that IFA has finally come to Mumbai. Since my first interaction with the organisation over a decade ago, I have discovered all the great work that it has been doing. For a young person to make the choice to be an artist is very difficult... Mercifully an organisation like IFA has come forward to lend a helping hand to artists who need subsidies to create original work or to do the kind of work for which they wouldn’t find a market and therefore we have every reason to be grateful to IFA and to be very happy that it is finally spreading its tent enough to include Mumbai,” he said in a press interview. See his complete interview here. |
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Glimpses of the festival. For more images visit our facebook page. |
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Aruna Krishnamurthy moderates a panel discussion between artist Navjot Altaf, Astad Deboo's performers from the Salam Balak Trust - Neetu Kumari and Pankaj Gupta,
and Sohini Chakraborty, Founder-Director, Kolkata Sanved. |
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Arts Education
The International Arts Education Conference on The Artist and Education: Diversity and Justice in Bangalore was a big success and saw the participation of over 150 educators, artists, policy makers, donors and organisations. The conference was held on February 3 and 4, 2012, as part of Kali-Kalisu, IFA’s Arts Education initiative for government school teachers, supported by the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan. It featured four panel discussions on the role played by arts education in equipping teachers to create a just and equitable classroom.
The conference also featured breakout sessions by the Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts, Bangalore, Almut Brunnert, PASCH Officer, Goethe Institut, Bangalore, and Radha Ramaswamy, Founder, Centre for Community Dialogue and Change. Choreographer Astad Deboo and his troupe from the Salaam Balak Trust, which provides support for street children in New Delhi and Mumbai, also conducted a breakout session, apart from presenting a moving dance performance, Breaking Boundaries.
Prior to the conference, we held a seminar on January 30 and 31, 2012 for artists working in the field of education. On February 1, we organised field visits to government schools in Chamarajanagar and Mandya to give seminar participants an opportunity to meet Kali-Kalisu trained teachers and hear their personal reflections and insights.
To know more about the outcomes of the conference write to aruna@indiaifa.org. |
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Arts Research and Documentation
We made six grants for research and documentation in the last quarter to the following people:
Vikram Sampath—to study the impact of recording technology on South Indian classical music and the role played by women singers in democratising this art form.
Gautam Pemmaraju—to make a film on the declining satirical poetic tradition in Dakkhani Urdu known as Mizahiya Shairi.
Ayswarya Sankaranarayanan—to make an animation film on the 47 miniature paintings in the Pahari tradition at the Amar Mahal Palace, Jammu, which tell the story of Nala-Damayanti.
Sajitha Madathil—to write a book on the intervention of women in the performance practices of Kathakali, Singaari Melam and Mudiyattam in Kerala.
Khushboo Bharti—to write a book and create an exhibition on the role of the state government’s art patronage and policy and its impact on public art projects in Jaipur.
Himanshu Verma—to make a film on the journey of the Genda Phool songs, which form a part of the repertoire of Chhattisgarhi folk music, across varying musical, cultural and social contexts. |
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Roma Chatterji’s authoritative treatise on the visual narratives in folk art is now in print. Her research for the book, which involved undertaking a comparative study between Bengal Scroll Painting and Gond Art from Madhya Pradesh, was supported by IFA. Her study explored the visual landscape of the art forms in light of the changes that they have undergone due to state patronage and market forces. |
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Special Grants
Artist and animation filmmaker Aditi Chitre successfully concluded a 12-day workshop for children, on story writing and illustration, in Chizami, Nagaland. The workshop, held between January and February 2012, is one of the activities supported by a special grant that is enabling Aditi to encourage children in Nagaland to explore their creativity by engaging with various styles of narration, visualisation and illustration.
“Despite an initial reluctance towards working on their own stories they opened up with a few warm-up exercises and were writing up a storm by day two. At the end of the workshop, each child had written and illustrated around three stories,” said Aditi. The next step of this project will involve the designing of a book of stories and an exhibition of the original paintings in Dimapur in July 2012.
Kolkata Sanved, a dance movement therapy organisation, which received an IFA grant to hold creative arts workshops with children living in and around four railway platforms in West Bengal, showcased some of the results of its work through its own version of a flash mob dance performance on a railway platform in the city in February. |
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New Performance
In the last quarter we made one grant to the Pyara Kerketta Foundation in Ranchi, which partially support a two-day national conference on March 27 and 28, 2012 to facilitate critical reflection on contemporary Dalit and Adivasi theatre in India. |
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Community Engagement
Over 50 artists, including several students from the Sir J. J. Institute of Applied Art and Rachna Sansad, attended the IFA and Clark House Initiative event on March 13 at Clark House, Mumbai. The event was organised to give the artists’ community in the city an overview of the support available to them from IFA. It also gave IFA staff a chance to meet artists who are experimenting with new materials, forms and idioms.
Rashmi Sawhney and Mohit Kaycee, were present at the event. They spoke about some of IFA’s earlier grants to support residencies, research and documentation and curatorial practice. This presentation fuelled an animated discussion on the importance of residencies and on the need to evolve artist-run support structures. Participants reluctantly parted after five hours of conversation only after IFA’s programme team had made several promises to ensure further interactions.
A similar event was also held in Open Space, Pune on March 16, 2012, organised with the gracious support of Ujwala Sawant and the Open Space team. It was moderated by three members of IFA’s programme staff—Ashutosh Poddar, Rashmi Sawhney and Mohit Kaycee. The objective was to engage with artists, researchers and students to gain an understanding of the kinds of arts practices being developed in the field and share details of IFA's Extending Arts Practice and New Performance programmes. Like in Mumbai, this event packed a full house and generated animated discussions about arts practice, funding and IFA's programmes. We have subsequently received many enquiries about our programmes along with several interesting project ideas. |
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Slant / Stance |
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Vidyun Sabhaney is a comic book/graphic novel artist based in Delhi. She received an IFA grant to study how stories from the Mahabharata are told in three picture-based performance traditions—Patuachitra from Bengal, Kaavad from Rajasthan and Togalu Gombeyatta from Karnataka—with the aim of extending and enriching her practice as a comic book artist.
In conversation with the artist… |
IFA: After completing your Bachelors in Journalism from Lady Sri Ram College how and why did you make the transition to comic book writing?
Vidyun Sabhaney: I wrote my dissertation on comic journalism with a focus on the work of Joe Sacco, a reputed Maltese-American comics artist and journalist who achieved international acclaim for his graphic novels on the Palestinian conflict and the Bosnian War. That was when I developed a serious interest in comics. Of course I have always been a fan growing up and my library contained all the regulars—Asterix, Tintin, Calvin and Hobbes, Amar Chitra Katha, etc.
While working on my dissertation I also participated in a comic book workshop, titled The Comix Workshop, organised by Sarai, CSDS and the French Information and Resource Center. I figured that if I was writing about comics it would make sense to learn how to make them. That was where I met Shohei Emura, with whom I began my first collaboration, i.e. The Chilka Project.
FOOTNOTE: This project focused on keeping alive the tradition of interpretive storytelling in the Mahabharata, through collaborations between an Indian comic writer and a Japanese artist. For ‘Chilka’ the artists created original stories within the Mahabharata universe, using artistic license to turn peripheral characters into heroes. Vidyun and Shohei also sought to develop a style of Manga that would work in an Indian context. The comic ‘Chilka’ will come out later this year in the Pao Anthology. Shohei also serves as the illustrator for the IFA-funded project.
Since then, I have collaborated with other artists and have recently begun to draw my own comics—one of these was published by Blaft Publications in February of this year. I started drawing because it was important for me to understand the physical process of actually making a comic.
IFA: The Mahabharata seems to be the common link connecting your work on The Chilka Project and the project you are pursuing with a grant from IFA. Could you tell us more about your fascination with the epic?
Vidyun Sabhaney: My interest in the Mahabharata was initially about finding a space within the epic, where new stories could be generated. ‘Chilka’, the comic that will be published later this year, is a story that Shohei and I wrote about a forgetful old warrior who is obsessed with ideas of destiny and heroism. The comic is the story of his journey at the battle of Kurukshetra, and the kind of mischief he unwittingly gets up to there. In some ways, it uses a new character to poke fun at the incongruity between what the epic seems to tell us to believe and how its central characters behave.
On reading more about the epics, I realised that this ‘experimentation’ with characters and incidents was not new or unnatural in any way—for centuries, this playful and inventive approach has been an important part of the process that created the epic. The spaces where the epics developed were oral storytelling traditions—several of which used sequential visual narrative to tell their stories. As a comic book artist, this piqued my interest. I began to get interested in which images were chosen for these visual narratives, how they were chosen and what affects their composition. I finally narrowed down on three forms, which was quite a task, given the number of picture-based storytelling forms in India that tell stories from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The forms are Bengali Patuachitra, Rajasthani Kaavad and Togalu Gombeyatta from Karnataka.
IFA: What determined your choice?
Vidyun Sabhaney: A basic requirement was some element of sequentiality in the visual language used in the storytelling object. Apart from that, there were other factors—the first was material. I wanted some diversity with respect to the materials that the forms employed—comic book artists do not have spaces that can train them to work with different materials, so this was a golden opportunity in that sense. The other factor was, of course, how accessible the form and its practicing artists are—after all, several pictorial narrative forms are on the brink of extinction.
Taking all of these things into consideration, Patuachitra was the first and most natural choice, given its panelised format. My initial interest in it stemmed from a desire to see if I could take its narrative format one step further in the form of a comic. The second was Togalu Gombeyatta (the fieldwork for which is complete), which uses two-dimensional puppets made of leather to tell stories from the epics. An older form of Togalu uses compositional puppets, which means they can represent more than one character and story element in one puppet. Kaavad is very different—it is in the format of a wooden folding temple, wherein the story is revealed as the temple is ‘opened’. How the shape and design of the object here acutely affect the experience of the story, is what drew me to this form.
I find that the materials that these forms employ are becoming more and more important for the project.
IFA: How will you study these art forms?
Vidyun Sabhaney: I’ve just returned from Karnataka where I spent a month studying Togalu Gombeyatta. My research focused on understanding the storytelling technique of the form through conversations and interviews with puppeteers, and on the nuances of the medium through lessons in puppet making. The older form of Togalu Gombeyatta is called ‘Jamkat Baavl’, wherein compositional puppets are used. In the puppeteers’ own estimation, this older form fell out of fashion almost fifty years ago. As a result, I found it very hard to find practicing puppeteers who knew about the compositional technique and production unique to the older style. Often I found myself quizzing artists about what their fathers had told them, filling in the blanks with calculated guesses. This is also why it was important for me to study the material used in the art form. By making leather used for puppets, I understood a few of the physical restraints that the puppeteer could have been under when he made the puppet, at least a hundred years ago, even though he wasn’t there to tell us himself.
I find this approach to be a very good entry point into understanding the nuances of all the forms as each of them uses unique materials. Next, I look forward to learning how to make dyes and paper from Patuachitra artists.
IFA: What do you seek to understand through your research?
Vidyun Sabhaney: In exploring the three oral traditions, I want to open up the dialogue on the logic that underpins the visual language that they use. I cannot predict how much of this will actually flow into my future work as a comic book artist but I perceive this study as a prism through which to view my own techniques. It gives me the opportunity to understand visual narratives that have functioned without using the comic book panel, a tool that I am so accustomed to. I want to bring these learnings to other comic book artists as well. For this, I have planned two things. Once all the fieldwork is complete, I plan to create an online archive of images, interviews, performances and articles based on our travels. These forms and their practitioners should be easily accessible to comic book artists in India. The website will be designed for those interested in the visual narrative, specifically. The second is a workshop on these forms specifically for comic book artists, later in the year.
I also plan a series of short comics based on our experiences of travelling and attempting to understand these forms, for which work has begun. I hope it can strike a balance between wholesome information and excellent comix. |
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India Foundation for the Arts
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