Serendipity Arts Festival 2024 curtain-raiser: 8 art & culture things to do over 8 days in Goa

The 9th edition of Serendipity Arts Festival 2024 will take place in Panaji, Goa, from December 15-22.

One of South Asia’s largest and most anticipated arts festival is gearing to paint Goa red with its multidisciplinary arts celebrations, come December 15 till December 22. In its ninth edition this year, a distinguished lineup of curators bring their expertise and vision to 200-plus projects, by 1,800-plus artists, at 22-plus venues, ensuring a vibrant and diverse showcase across multiple disciplines. Next year, in its 10th year, Serendipity Arts Festival (SAF) will go international with its first international debut in Birmingham, the UK, scheduled to take place from May 23 to June 1, 2025, featuring over 60 events exhibiting South Asian art and culture. One in four Birmingham residents is of South Asian descent, of which India makes up 5.8 per cent and a part of the city’s rich art and cultural history.

But before that, if you’re headed to Goa for Christmas/New Year, or happen to be in the Konkan haven, between December 15 and 22, add Panaji as the annual SAF is a must-visit art and culture festival, free for all, that will keep tourists and locals engaged alike. Block your calendars, and pick from the following eight forms over the eight days of SAF, in its ninth edition this year, or event better sample them all, hop from one exhibit to another, as the festival spread across multiple venues are all in and around Panjim. Take your pick:

Dance

Curated by Geeta Chandran and Jayachandran Palazhy, the dance segments will include an interactive Odissi performance with live music and projections, titled Sutra by Sharmila Biswas on how the classical form evolved. The timeless tale of love and tragedy of Sohni and Mahiwal will come alive with Kathak in a piece titled Aqeedat, Love’s Union in the Divine, blending immersive storytelling, Punjabi folklore, and live music.

Visual Arts

Veerangana Solanki and Thukral & Tagra have put together “Multiplay”, blurring the boundaries between artist and audience, egging the onlookers to reflect on the complexities of an interconnected world and eke out dynamic artworks that address fragility and socio-political urgencies.  Solanki also brings “A Haptic Score”, an aural-tactile participatory installation art, designed for accessibility, particularly for persons with disabilities, especially those with vision impairment.

Theatre

Quasar Thakore Padamsee and Sankar Venkateswaran foreground the themes of memory, identity and shaping of narratives on stage with three presentations: “Do You Know This Song?”, a musical theatrical performance by Mallika Taneja; In the multidisciplinary “Glitch in the Myth”, Ramayana is reinterpreted from the perspective of a young woman; and "Mattiah 22:39", takes from Mathew 22:39, set in the backdrop of a devastating drought, and looks at human relationships during crisis and scarcity.

Craft

Sandeep Sangaru curates “Abundance in Scarcity” to trains the lens on Ladakh’s artisans’ resourceful craftsmanship to create sustainable designs. In “Past Forward”, co-curator Kristine Michael looks at sustainability and upcycling by refashioning ancient crafts to adapt to and address modern challenges.

Music

Zubin Balaporia and Bickram Ghosh come together to create diverse musical experience. “One World” will marry rock with fusion and Indian classical elements, and cry a harmonic prayer for humanity’s return to unity and peace. Leave all the dissonances for the artists to create something beautiful out of it, every other kind of dissonance in the world are avoidable damaging noises. The segment brings back to stage veterans (even pioneers so to speak) of Indian underground rock world, members of Indus Creed band, along with one of India’s best guitarists of all time, the legend Warren Mendonsa (Blackstratblues), and the Northeast singing-strumming septuagenarian sensation Lou Majaw, and Pratika Gopinath, of the band Easy Wanderlings.

Curator Ghosh has two Indian musical forms presentations up his sleeve, too. One is “The Three Divas”, a jugalbandi between the icons Usha Uthup, Shubha Mudgal and Aruna Sairam. And, “Shaam-e-Ghazal”, with a touch of the avant-garde, will honour the ghazal legends Ghulam Ali, Mehdi Hasan, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Mehdi Hasan, Pankaj Udhas and Jagjit Singh.

Culinary Arts

Edible Issues programmed interdisciplinary theatre performance “Come Eat With Me”, centred around Dalit cuisine, through shared stories over a communal meal. Personal stories and oral histories from Sri Vamsa Matta’s household and community, anecdotes from mythology and contemporary realities will be dotted by academic discussion on the complex, and often oppressive but also resilient, relationship between caste and food.

Bring-Your-Own-Pickle (BYOP) will encourage participants to bring their favourite pickles, pickling practices and stories, homemade or store-bought. MOCK Wild Picnic Series will use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to graft together complementary farming types. And how AI can be used to substitute animal-derived products with ingredients procured from regenerative agroecosystems. The Center for Genomic Gastronomy will serve recipes and tasters that combine food forest ingredients with non-animal products that are high in protein and/or fat.

Accessibility

Often persons with disabilities and the lack of their accessibility in everyday India isn’t even a topic of discussion, let alone it being a key part of major events. At Serendipity Arts Festival, Salil Chaturvedi has curated two events in collaboration with The Goa Bird Conservation, Nature’s Symphony, which an outdoor bird watching expedition in nature and an indoor session, initiatives designed to make bird watching accessible to individuals with vision impairment. And, the three-day Blind Date with Friends to foster understandign and connections by pairing a neurodivergent and a neurotypical attendee.

Special Projects

There will be a slew of special segments, too. A one-of-a-series of special performance art project — dance films inspired by urban landscapes — by Preethi Athreya. Comedy Wagon will tickle the ribs with standup acts by the likes of Biswa Kalyan Rath, Urooj Asfaq, among others. Gaya Tideman shaped Music in the Park, a riverside art park featuring daily lineup of local talents and EDM music. Sound, storytelling and multimedia join hands to reimagine traditional concerts in B-Side by Project, facilitated by Zainab Wani (Zequenx).

Commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and SAF, "The Game of Whispers" is an interactive video game that parallels the political intrigue of the Mughal Empire during Shah Jahan's reign with modern AI-driven disinformation. Set within a rendition of Delhi’s Red Fort, it explores how rumours and power dynamics from the past mirror the narrative manipulation of today’s technology. Characters modelled on Mughal miniature paintings and powered by advanced language models like ChatGPT, engage in lifelike conversations that deepen the cycle of disinformation. There will be an AI Lab, too, which will exhibit the “how technology is becoming an integral part of artistic expression. How AI and Machine Learning are influencing every aspect of life, including the arts, how artists can use AI as a tool for creative experimentation and innovation​. By introducing AI-driven projects this year, we encourage artists and audiences to engage with these new possibilities that escape neat categorisation,” says Sunil Kant Munjal, businessman and founder of Serendipity Arts Festival.

Last but far from least is the exhibition on one legend by another. Bhupen in Goa, curated by veteran artist Gulammohammed Sheikh, takes a comprehensive look at more than 300 mixed media works delving into the life and legacy of the late artist Bhupen Khakhar — India’s first Pop Artist, in the world of paintings, who popularised Narrative Figuration — who would have stepped into his 90th year this March.