• The vibe in Panaji is one of frenetic activity — with structures going up, artwork being hung, and curators and artists rushing around to the echo of hammers and saws. “The fortnight before the Serendipity Arts Festival (SAF) opens is always vibrant with activity and expectation, also because the Goa Arts and Literary Festival takes place at this time. So December is a marvellous time for contemporary culture in the state,” says Ranjit Hoskote, who is curating The Sacred Everyday exhibition. Last year, it attracted over three lakh footfalls.
  • Just two editions old, SAF — founded by Sunil Kant Munjal, Chairman of Hero Enterprise — is young, but has already made an impact in India’s art scene. “The biggest difference is that we are multi-disciplinary; we work with two curators per discipline [from theatre director Atul Kumar to art historian Annapurna Garimella], to bring diverse voices together. We call ourselves a cultural experiment because we experiment with our curators and artists, to see what works,” says Smriti Rajgarhia, festival director. Spread across 13 venues in Panaji, the overarching attempt this year has been to make it accessible. So there is no one theme. “We feel a theme is very excluding in nature because you only look at a specific set of works. It’s only as the curators bring in their projects that we see specific strains coming up. Like, there are a lot of artists working with technology this time; it’s also very experimental. For example, music director Sneha Khanwalkar is doing Sounds In My Head — which is not only about sound and how you experience it, but questions why museums have to be only about art.” There is also a lot of focus on the margins. “With section 377 and how that has changed a lot of the voices, you will see a lot of projects that address this,” she says.
  • With over 90-plus projects — ranging from music and dance to theatre, photography, craft, and the culinary arts — you can also look forward to workshops, talks and performances. Highlights include the Flute House by Pooja Shetty — “she is inspired by how wind comes through gaps, sounding almost like flutes, so she is constructing a house within a building” — Aneesh Pradhan’s Revolutions Per Minute, which explores Goan musical traditions through a design installation, and Hoskote’s transhistorical and trans-genre exhibition, which is spread across two venues — the Adil Shah Palace and the Church of Santa Monica — “to create a new intersection of audiences”. “The works — from Gomira masks and Company School gouache paintings to pioneering Indian Christian artists like Angelo da Fonseca and Antonio da Cruz — cut across conventional boundaries,” says Hoskote.
  • The Serendipity Arts Festival is from December 15-22