With the hope to bring you some enriching ideas from the world of arts and culture, the Staying Connected series by IFA presents articles, talks, discussions, work of our grantees and project coordinators and other thought-provoking resources.
In this edition of Staying Connected, we look back on a project that speaks to the present times and our interactions with the internet. Created a little over four years ago, the project is a marriage between many art forms–film, music, theatre and dance–tracing the journey of a group of friends as the internet pervades every part of their lives...
In this edition of Staying Connected, we showcase two projects implemented by us that created podcasts that engage with diverse histories - of medicine, and of Christian Art in India. These podcasts highlight how the creative use of audiovisual media can lead to engagements welcoming newer interactions expanding access and forging relationships with audiences, while also telling us about the advent and evolution of different cultures and practices; and offering a glimpse into institutional histories...
This edition of Staying Connected features a project that explores what Qawwali means as a genre in cinema and share from an online archive that showcases and traces its history. The newsletter also brings to you recordings of conversations with artists on IFA implemented projects and grants from the past few months, the new projects implemented by us, open calls for proposals, reports on the impact of the grants and projects implemented by IFA, and our brand new IFA Archive Podcast...
This edition of Staying Connected reflects on a project that worked with collections at one of the historical museums of India, the Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata. Looking at paintings from 200 years ago, the project offers a glimpse into the life of ordinary Indians, the perceptions of the colonial artists towards Indian life, and how these works enable us to look at concepts of modernisation and urbanisation today...
Many artistic projects we have implemented in the last few years engage with digital lives, digital memory, archiving the work on a digital medium, or creating an interactive social media form to bring in the larger public. How different are these digital spaces? How do interactions on these platforms change artistic outcomes...
How does a singer choose to express themselves in their own language - a language that’s always been on the margins of the city? Watch a music video (the first in a series) by Mohammed Affan Pasha, exhibiting the everydayness of Bangalore in his mother tongue Dakhni–a language that has been under threat of being erased, misnamed or compelled to submit and become a dialect and subset of a larger language and cultural group...
A young girl documents a day in the life of her family in East Kolkata Wetlands. What does she see? Read about a day in the life of Rupsha Mondal, a class 7 student of Kheadaha High School, South 24 Parganas, West Bengal, who writes about her father and grandfather, fish breeders in the East Kolkata Wetlands (EKW)...
Would you like to experience an auditory bus ride across Bangalore, complete with horns, traffic, and chit-chat? In ‘201 Bus Project’, Rukmini Swaminathan creates soundscapes in Bangalore with intertwined sounds of traffic, songs and snatches of conversations to evoke the eerie stillness that descended upon us during the COVID-19 outbreak...
Would you like to play a game that invites you to protect, revive and transform the lakes in Bangalore? Once There Was a Lake by Chanakya Vyas is an interactive online game that chronicles the oral histories, mythologies, anecdotes and official records of the lakes in the city...
What do you see the Internet as? A space for unrestraint fun? A secret garden to connect with people from all over the world? An eternal source of wisdom? A scary tunnel? Or is it something else? A wide variety of exciting outcomes and conversations around our relationships with the internet and its complexities from a two-day festival titled 25x25 GOING LIVE!...
Gamestorming Narratives: a conversation with Dhruv Jani, Gayatri Kodikal, Vishal K Dar (discussant), and Avinash Kumar (moderator) engages with gaming as a form of artistic expression | City as Playground: a conversation with Vaibhav Dutt, Sumona Chakravarty, Nilanjan Das, and Sumana Chandrashekar (moderator) explores how artists use play as a means to address cities’ systemic problems | Learning through Play: a conversation in Kannada with Ningu Solagi, Keerthivathi, and Krishna Murthy TN focuses on why play matters in children's learning and education with reflections from their extensive teaching experience...
Seevbalak's Echochamber by Priya Sen is an installation using text, sound, and projections at the AIIS Archive & Research Centre for Ethnomusicology in Gurgaon | Dastan ek Talib ki ('Story of a Seeker') by Kafeel Jafri is a Dastangoi performance that explores the idea of the archive as a space for memory and history...
Hejjegalu is an annual publication in Kannada supported under the Kali Kalisu programme of IFA, featuring grantees and their projects and the larger story of arts education in India | Folklore and Oral Traditions in Classrooms: Savita Uday in conversation with Krishna Murthy TN is conversation organised by IFA under its Throwback Thursdays with IFA series with Savita Uday and Antara Mukherjee from a not-for-profit organisation called Buda Folklore located in the Uttara Kannada region in Karnataka...
OBJECTSPEAK is an online platform for sharing visuals and mini-stories about objects and to build an ongoing online archive of items that are handmade or produced for different contexts and purposes, of origin prior to mid-20th century from all over the world | Children’s Books from Bengal: A Documentation by Gargi Gangopadhyay is a website featuring visual and bibliographical documentation of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Bengali children’s books...
F-1/105 by Mohit Takaldar of Aasakta Kalamanch weaves the personal and the political, the physical and the psychological, and takes you through stunning revelations of the colour 'green' | S*x, M*rality and Cens*rship tells the story of Vijay Tendulkar’s controversial theatre classic Sakharam Binder which was attacked by the censor board and by sections of society...
With this project, Amit attempts to push the boundaries of cinema by juxtaposing it with ideas from philosophy, visual art, chess, mathematics, geometry, linguistics and psychology | A Kannada adaptation of the play Interior written by Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. Directed by Sankar Venkateswaran, Antharanga revolves around the theme of conflict between life and death...
Contemporary Dance in India Today: A Survey, an extensive report on the contemporary dance ecosystem in India was produced by Annette Leday, a leading choreographer, director trained in France and India, as a commission of the National Dance Center, Paris (Centre National de la Danse) in 2019 | Past Forward: Celebrating Critical Practices, a three-day arts festival organised by IFA in collaboration with Bangalore International Centre (BIC) in 2019 brought together a diverse line-up of projects supported under the Arts Practice programme in the past five years...
Chitpur Local by Sumona Chakravarty is centered around one particular neighbourhood- known as Jatrapara, or Battala, which was the hub of popular traditions like Jatra (travelling theatre), printmaking, publishing, jewellery-making, and bamboo crafts | Myself Mohan 1909 by Shaunak Mahbubani involved a series of multi-disciplinary artistic interventions in the 100-year old Mohan building, in Chikpet, one of the busiest shopping areas of Bangalore that brought alive the biographical journey of the Mohan building...
At times a silent film, at times an intimate conversation, at times a scenographic installation, Light Doesn’t Have Arms To Carry Us by Preethi Athreya proposes a way of interpreting the music which takes it out of the realm of auditory sensation and suggests other visual phenomena in which the music resides | Across, Not Over by Vikram Iyengar, choreographed by Preethi Athreya questions and re-frames notions of classicism and beauty by presenting the dancing body as an image of itself...
Between 2008 and 2013, IFA published 13 issues of ArtConnect comprising essays, accounts, interviews and reviews on a fascinating array of subjects | Published by IFA with support from the Infosys Foundation, the book titled Embroidering Futures: Repurposing the Kantha, edited by Ritu Sethi documents the journey of kantha embroidery...
Adishakti Laboratory For Theatre Art Research is a contemporary theatre research and repertory company near Pondicherry, India. Their play titled Brhannala which premiered in 1999 takes inspiration from the Mahabharatha and focuses on the episode where Arjuna spends a year disguised as a woman | Aasakta Kalamanch is a group of contemporary theatre performers based in Pune. Their play titled Tichee 17 Prakarane is an adaption of Attempts on Her Life by the British playwright Martin Crimp...
