Visual arts

Another highlight of the festival was its versatile visual arts programme, showcasing science-led works, AI art, multimedia installations and sustainable design. For one such project at the 1842-established Old Goa Medical College Complex, artists Jiten Thukral and Samir Tagra turned curators. Their Multiplay at the ground floor of Asia’s oldest medical college blurred the conventional boundaries of the artist and audience, encouraging participation from viewers. “This is an experiment,” says Tagra. “As we are constantly caught in multiplicity, multitasking and multi-thinking, we wanted to see how we can activate a body of work and understand what an art work is,” he added.

For his project, 6th Sense, artist LN Tallur took viewers into a dark room and asked them to create figures from clay and stone. These were then displayed. The workshop was designed to awaken and enhance the individual’s sixth sense by restricting their vision. Another such work was Abu Dhabi-based Ala Younis’s Friendship Garden: Playgrounds that encouraged visitors to imagine their future playgrounds by engaging with structures and materials like clay, wood, figurines and pigment. Younis wanted viewers to build, play and create forms that resonate with their understanding of land and community.

Artist and environmentalist Rachna Toshniwal also examined the connection between nature and communities through large tapestries woven with waste material found on the beaches in Alibaug, a coastal town near Mumbai.

The most sought-after show, however, was Bhupen in Goa, at the Portuguese-built Directorate of Accounts building. The structure built around 1851, once served as the state’s hub of finance. Featuring 164 paintings, drawings and sketches by Khakhar from the private collection of Sunil Kant Munjal, the show was curated by the artist’s closest friend, Gulammohammed Sheikh, himself one of the most respected artists in India. “It’s a comprehensive exhibition and quite important in that sense,” said Sheikh who revealed that it showcased some of the most “impressive” works from the collection.

One of these is Emancipated Man (1990), which shows a man on his death bed remembering the people in his life. Sheikh said it reminds him of Dying Inayat Khan, a powerful Mughal painting from 1618-19 attributed to Balchand, which shows the tragic decline of the opium-addicted Inayat Khan, a close attendant of Emperor Jahangir. The painting addresses the subject of death, which is soon to come for Khan. Khakhar’s work too talks about the inevitable end. “It is quite extraordinary, really,” said Sheikh.

Image in a Man’s Heart (1999) which portrays the artist with a circle in the middle of his body filled with his lovers, some of whom are also floating around outside, is another impressive painting. “It depicts Khakhar’s idea of love, which is all within and outside him,” said Sheikh.

Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei’s Water Lilies (2020) was at the Excise Building, another Portuguese-built structure dating to the 1600s. The large piece made up of 6,50,000 Woma blocks, which are like Lego, took up an entire room. The work draws upon French painter Claude Monet’s series on water lilies, that he created and continually revised between 1914 and 1926, the year of his death. Weiwei employs ostensibly playful, readily accessible building blocks whose rigid, rectangular, mass-produced shapes stand at odds with the soft, rounded, individualised applications of oil paints in the original. Through his work, Weiwei is perhaps pointing to the digitised mediation of imagery and the modern dissemination of visual information.

Theatre

Also on display at the Accounts building was documentary photographer and filmmaker Mritunjay Kumar’s The House Blue. The Serendipity Arts Foundation-commissioned project was a blend of pop-up photography and collaborative narrative theatre performance. Photographs of government quarters in Bokaro Steel City, Jharkhand, where the artist grew up, occupied an entire room. The pictures were taken in 2019, on the day that Mritunjay Kumar’s father announced they were to vacate the house the following day. “My father said this and walked away to sleep in another room. But I was shocked, in panic. It felt like I was losing everything that I had grown up with,” he said. When theatre maker Anish Victor saw the pictures, he prompted Mrityunjay to write about them and his feelings and this new production of photographs and performative art was the result. In the process of photographing his childhood home, Mrityunjay learnt that the quarters were built on indigenous land. This then made him question the idea of home, migration and how homelessness felt, all of which are addressed in his solo act.

Another commissioned performance for the theatre section was Relief Camp by Kalakshetra Manipur. Directed by Heisnam Tomba Singh, the play, which addressed the violence and political unrest in Manipur and the suffering of its people includes sub plots taken from real life incidents. such as a woman being burnt alive, and a father and son being shot dead in their sleep. “The play was received quite well. A few people also wanted to talk to us about our state and what’s happening there,” said assistant director Pangambam Tyson Meitei.

Curators of the theatre section, Quasar Thakore Padamsee and Sankar Venkateswaran allotted five hours to Koodiyattam, a Sanskrit theatre form from Kerala. Guru G Venu’s troupe performed the love story of King Dushyanta and Sakuntala, which is celebrated for its lyrical beauty, emotional depth, and masterful use of language. “This time we decided to look outside our phone books and invite applications from across the country,” said Thakore Padamsee. “We received entries from across India and were able to put together a diverse programme ranging from solo acts to group performances and regional theatre too,” he said.

Some projects blurred the boundaries between art, theatre and dance. Poems on the Move was one such. A poet would accompany commuters on the festival’s colourful shuttles and read their poems aloud as the group moved from one location to another. Young poet Asavari Gurav who recited her works on women’s empowerment and the colour red to hundreds in this way stated that it was “an enriching experience”.

As always, SAF had much to offer and succeeded in engaging viewers in newer forms, all the while pushing the boundaries of art as we know it.

Riddhi Doshi is an independent journalist.