Staying Connected #20 | Of Hope and Things to Come | February 01, 2022

We hope you are all safe and well. At IFA, we continue to work and engage with artists and scholars online to implement projects with them. This edition of Staying Connected brings to you the work of some of the artists, information about events conducted by us in the last few months, and also what’s new at IFA.

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). This article is part of a larger project being implemented by IFA with Nobina Gupta as the Project Coordinator, titled Jol-a-bhumir Golpo Katha | Stories Of The Wetland. The project aims to document and disseminate the stories of the EKW as experienced by the community, created by its young people, with Rupsa being one of them. Click here to know more.  

Nobina Gupta is Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project, implemented by India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) under their Archives and Museums programme, in collaboration with People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI). This project is made possible with part-support from Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi. 

Our reflections on a year of loss, resilience and hope
 

Our Annual Report for the year 2020-2021 is a journal of the difficult year that was, and the reinvigorating work we engaged with in 2020-2021 at IFA, across disciplines, forms, aesthetics, languages, and regions in India.

We hope the many stories and experiences in the report inspire you too.

An arts project that rethinks the boundaries of mythology and sci-fi

A classroom project that collaborates with students to learn English through local history

A film and essay that explore the narratives of an old, forgotten building in Bangalore

Listen to conversations around three projects that explored these ideas in their own ways, organised as part of Project Showcase @ IFA, a series of online presentations to showcase, discuss, and engage audiences with the diverse projects we support across programmes.

we are opposite like that

Click here to listen to a presentation by Himali Singh Soin and a conversation with Anshika Varma, about Himali’s book that used fictional mythologies to address the politics of ecology, language, and perspectives from the Global South.

Himali Singh Soin received a grant from IFA in 2018-2019 under the Arts Practice programme. 

ಸ್ಥಳೀಯ ಇತಿಹಾಸದೊಂದಿಗೆ ಆಂಗ್ಲ ಭಾಷಾ ಕಲಿಕೆ (Learning English through local history)

Click here for Sunil Kumar AM’s presentation about his ongoing project at Government Higher Primary School, Aletti, Dakshina Kannada district, that involves fifth grade students learning English through various literary and theatre arts processes by exploring local history. 

Sunil received a grant from IFA in 2019-2020 under the Arts Education programme, made possible with support from Citi India.

Tales from Building No. 37

Click here to listen to a presentation by Mahesh S and Anuj Malhotra about their project that sought to investigate into the conception of an old and iconic building in Bangalore, Karnataka, the impact it has had on the city and imagine its possible futures.

Mahesh received a grant from IFA in 2019-2020 under the Project 560 programme, made possible with support from Citi India and Cholamandalam Investment and Finance Company.

Experience a Kalayatra, where IFA grantees share their work
with local communities and schools.

Watch the recording of the virtual Kalayatra organised by IFA in December 2021, with teachers from Haveri District in Karnataka (this session was conducted in Kannada). At the session, Arts Education grantees Balappa Irappa Chinagudi and Praveen presented their projects. Kalayatras are a vital part of our Arts Education programme, designed in the hope that they will develop comprehensive approaches for integrating the arts with the school curricula, strengthening arts instruction and improving the students’ academic performance.

New Projects

We are delighted to announce the implementation of new projects under Productions, Explorations and Workshops, Residencies, Seminars categories of the Arts Practice programme and under the Neighbourhood Engagements category of Project 560 programme, for the year 2021-2022. Read more about them below.

Sahil Ravindra Naik (Productions) will produce a series of architectural sculptures based on memories, oral narratives and legends of people from the Kurdi village in Goa.

Masoom Parmar (Productions) will create a performance that seeks to reinvent Bharatanatyam by bringing in values of pluralism, based on the lived experiences of a non-binary, Muslim Zoroastrian dancer practicing Hindu temple dance form.

Tarun Bhartiya (Productions) will create a series of photographs that examine notions of identity and contestations around questions of faith and nation-building among the Niam Khasi people.

Anisha Baid (Productions) will create a video game that investigates into expressions of corporate culture and gendered labour as manifested on the computer interface.

Aranya Sengupta (Productions) will create a series of artist books that investigate the history and evolution of printmaking technologies in Bengal, focusing on five milestone methods of printmaking. 

Thoudam Victor Singh (Productions) will create a physical poetry performance that critiques the efficacy of six mega hydro projects in Manipur that failed to live up to their intended purpose. 

Anishaa Tavag (Explorations) will work on a collaborative project between four contemporary dancers, rethinking and re-embodying ideas of community and co-work through a series of weekly or bi-weekly shared journeys.

Andrew Prashanth (Explorations) will experiment with motion and sound to create a form for Asunam, a non-Vedic mythical creature from Sangam Literature of the classical Tamil oeuvre.

Birender Kumar Yadav (Explorations) will examine the lives and conditions of work of migrant labourers of the brick kilns of Mirzapur through artistic collaboration with them.

Mohit Prakash Shelare (Explorations) will examine how the trauma of seeing violent imagery across the internet including social media can be sublimated through artistic processes of drawing.

Nihaal Faizel (Explorations) will engage with three popular children’s television shows from the latter part of the 1990s, as cultural documents in media that traces shifts in our lives in the India of the post-liberalisation era.

Prantik Narayan Basu (Explorations) will critically examine the conflicting emotions of pleasure and guilt in the context of self-awakening as a homosexual, and investigate the ethical representation of love and sexuality on screen with the help of intimacy experts.

Rukhsana Nazeen (Explorations) will creatively express the experiences of the everyday impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Bidar through a series of Afsaanche – very short, paragraph length stories in Urdu – and its digital exploration in the audio format of the podcast. 

Srishti Lakhera (Explorations) will situate the Yarshagumba, a medicinal mushroom in the upper Himalayas, as a nodal point to study the shifts in narratives of the pastoral Rung community as they move between one world with digital networks and another with oral traditions and myths, while harvesting this precious herbal produce used in Chinese medicine.

Suvani Suri (Explorations) will examine the anatomy of a collective song We Shall Overcome, through aggregating data about its musicality, structure, popularity maps, analytics, and audience interactions such as YouTube comments, of its various iterations across time, geography, language and political context.

Mangka Mayanglambam (Workshops, Residencies, Seminars) will create a music workshop on the folk and traditional music and culture of the Chakpa community in the two villages, Phayeng and Leimaram, 30 km away from Imphal.

Singh Siddharth (Workshops, Residencies, Seminars) will create a design residency for architects and designers to reimagine the architectonics of performance spaces including those for theatre in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and physical distancing.

Mehar Zariwala (Neighbourhood Engagements) will work on creating a series of zines that documents the history and lived experiences of residents of Rustum Bagh, a neighbourhood in Bangalore. 

Ishan Hendre (Neighbourhood Engagements) will create a series of video vignettes capturing stories of the gold and silver crafting community in Cubbonpete and Anchepete in Bangalore.

Maya Janine D’Costa (Neighbourhood Engagements) will create a series of drawings that investigates the role of the market place in the city through interactions in the meat market in Murphy Town, Ulsoor.
 

Open Calls for Proposals

Are you an artist, scholar, cultural practitioner
hoping to apply for support from IFA?

We are currently accepting proposals under the categories of Workshops, Residencies, Seminars, and Arts Platforms of the Arts Practice where artists expand their present range of practices in new directions. You can apply throughout the year.

Work with Us

Come join our team to help administer projects
with artists, scholars and practitioners in the field!

We are currently inviting applications for the following positions:

Programme Officer: Archives and Museums programme

The candidate will be managing the Archives and Museums programme at IFA, and lead a virtual museum that is currently being set up. For more information about the role, please click here.
Application deadline: February 07, 2022.

Grants and Projects Officer

The candidate will be responsible for administration of grants, implementation of projects, and legal issues related to the organisation. For more information about the role, click here.
Application deadline: February 10, 2022.

Would you like to be surrounded by the arts this year
and get a glimpse of what we do?

Our 14-month Limited Edition 2022-2023 desk calendar features select projects that we have supported in the last two years. You choose any image that is to your liking, and let the artwork do its magic!

We also have a beautiful set of six coasters featuring IFA projects over the years, so you can be surrounded with the arts as you take a break and enjoy your cuppa. 

They are also available as a combo at a discount, for a limited period.

Buy them both here.

Become a Friend of IFA

At IFA, we believe that the arts and culture are essential to our individual and community lives, and for a more equitable and just world. We continue to turn to the arts to regain trust and hope in our lives, and also take inspiration. In this new year, we invite you to become a Friend of IFA, and join a community that supports artists in adapting to changing realities and keeping their endeavours going.