Serendipity Arts Trust announces the first edition of Serendipity Arts Festival to be held in Goa

This will be India’s premier, curated, interdisciplinary arts festival, held in Goa from Dec 16 – 23.

The Festival aims to encourage the evolving arts community, promote a culture of patronage and create value for the arts, thus ensuring India’s place in the global cultural dialogue.

Serendipity Arts Festival will be the first of its kind in India to celebrate the diversity in art with a special focus on performing, visual, and culinary arts.

The Festival aims to bind and promote art and culture that is unique to the various geographies in the sub-continent, on a single collaborative platform.

An intensive, exciting program of exhibitions and performances spanning these disciplines will be augmented by spaces for social and educational engagement. To make the platform accessible, a majority of these programmes will be free and require only a basic registration.

Speaking at the announcement press conference, Sunil Kant Munjal, Chairman, Hero Corporate Service Pvt. Limited, said, “The Serendipity Arts Festival at Goa is an interdisciplinary curated arts festival, designed to challenge boundaries and redefine the formats of presentation and engagement. It is a unique social responsibility project, which will promote education, spread awareness, empower artists, and reassert value in the arts. The festival will also promote arts education and revive interdisciplinary arts through collaborations between organisations, artists and audiences.  It aims to bring back patronage of the arts by initiating engagement; the idea is to develop newer ways of looking at art and culture. Nurturing our rich past, while acknowledging the present, the festival addresses the future and the new vocabularies that are rooted yet progressive. We hope the Festival will give momentum to the many ongoing initiatives and trigger a larger and much-needed arts and culture wave in the country through similar public initiatives.”

Also speaking at the conference,  Preeta Singh, Festival Director said, “We are thrilled to announce the first edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival, which we believe will change the way art is consumed in India. We understand the eminent need to break the conventional compartmentalisation of art in India, wherein every discipline is evolving in isolation. Through this festival we aim to bring together all these disciplines on one collaborative platform to achieve even bigger creative outcomes. We are celebrating diversity in art with a special focus on visual, performing and culinary arts, each of which will be led by renowned curators with distinct backgrounds.”

The event also saw the announcement of the curatorial panel of experts from distinct backgrounds representing the disciplines that will be a part of the festival. All the curators have been selected in order to start conversations and exchange across artistic styles, generations, and geographies.

Under the Visual Arts spectrum, the curatorial body encompasses the likes of Jyotindra Jain, cultural historian, museologist and recipient of the Prince Claus Awards, and Manjari Nirula, vice-president of World Crafts Council Asia-Pacific Region and member of the Government of India committee for selection of master crafts persons.

They are joined by Dinesh Khanna, co-founder of the Delhi Photo Festival, and Prashant Panjiar, co-founder of Delhi Photo Festival and photojournalist, who has served on the jury of the World Press Photo Awards. Celebrated curators Riyas Komu, co-founder and secretary of the Kochi Biennale Foundation, and Ranjit Hoskote, celebrated poet and cultural theorist, are also a part of the panel.

The curators for Performing Arts are notable names from the fields of music, dance and theatre. These include, Sanjeev Bhargava, founder and director of Seher and Tanusree Shankar, internationally acclaimed dancer.

Lending their musical expertise are Ranjit Barot, globally recognised drummer, singer and composer, and Shubha Mudgal, acclaimed Indian classical singer and composer. Anuradha Kapur, renowned theatre personality, and Sangeet Natak Awardee, and Lillete Dubey, actor and theatre director, will be curating the theatre segment.

The Culinary Arts segment will be led by celebrated chef and restaurateur Manu Chandra, and Odette Mascarenhas, eminent food columnist, historian and founder of Goan Culinary Club  – a non-profit venture which strives to preserve the authenticity of Goan cuisine.