Since 2017, The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), in collaboration with Serendipity Arts Foundation, has conducted annual courses for young practitioners. The courses have been structured to familiarise them with significant directions in contemporary art practice to be incorporated into art pedagogy. Each practitioner worked with different areas of focus, including aspects of light, sound, site, movement, storytelling and narrative, via mediums like comics, installations, and video. The courses opened up possibilities of conceptualising and making through the process of research, reading, experimenting with mediums, collaboration and exchange.

Curator Vidya Shivadas selected a group of FICA awardees for the festival’s 2019 edition. “The exhibition at Serendipity Arts Festival in 2019 showcases the experiences gathered by the participants in these mentor-led, and equally peer learning, courses. It creates conditions in which we may think of broader thematic questions that emerged from this exercise of considering what constitutes art pedagogy today and what is the role of the artist itself in our present times,” says Shivadas.

Here, STIR takes a walk with Shivadas as she dives deep into some of the works on display.

(The participating artists are - Ajit Kumar, Akshay Sethi, Akup Buchem, Ankan Dutta, Ankit Ravani, Bhanu Gola, Debasis Beura, Dhrubajit Sarma, Gyanwant Yadav, Khandakar Ohida, Maksud Ali Mondal, Maya D'Costa, Pallavi Arora, Pavithra Ramanujam, Priyank Gothwal, Priyesh Gothwal, Rahul Kamalasan, Ritika Mittal, Ritika Sharma, Rohit Yadav, Sagar Gupta, Sana Bansal, Selvam Palani, Shikha Sreenivas, Shweta Sharma, Tahsin Akhtar, Tanaya Rao Raj, Tehmeena Firdos, Tilottama Bhowmick, Umesh Singh, Utsuk Sharma, V Prabhu, Vikrant Kano, Yogesh Ramakrishna and Zeel Sanghavi)