Serendipity Arts Residency artists present collage of tales, transformation, and intimacy

New Delhi, Aug 6 (PTI) Ningkhan Keishing looks at the tall three-legged "sculptural folktale" that he has created and is transported back to his home in Manipur, where sitting around the Lusivi, the wood stove, his mother would tell him a "Phunga Wari", a traditional folk tale.

At the culmination of three-month Serendipity Arts Residency, Keishing is one of the five artists to showcase his work here for a week-long multidisciplinary exhibition that explores the idea of memory, transformation, intimacy, sexuality and identities.

The 29-year-old Keishing from Manipur has pulled out from his memories the traditional wood stove and given it a large ceramic interpretation, verging on the abstract, titled "Phunga Wari" (Lusivi), as a vessel for memory, storytelling, and intergenerational wisdom.

"It's like a fire place, where people gather around and share stories. The elders of the house tell tales. They narrate folk tales and stuff. It's a warm kind of feeling. I tried to create that and I want to create this kind of folk tale that already exists in the tradition and it is vanishing today," the ceramicist told PTI.

The sculpture is also a call to one of the stories his mother would tell him where the three legs of the stove are represented by the mother, the father, and the spirit.

"Like a song passed down through generations, this piece holds nostalgia and imagination in equal measure. I want people to pause before this abstract form and wonder - what is it? What does it mean? I want them to feel, even without words, the story my mother once shared," he said.

The eighth edition of the Open Studio exhibition, running from August 2-8, is part of the Serendipity Arts Foundation's year-long lead up to the 10th edition of Serendipity Arts Festival, to take place in Panjim, Goa, from December 12-21.

The studio space was shared by residents: Keishing, Anishaa Tavag, Anshumaan Sathe, Malavika Bhatia, Valia Russo, and programmer-in-residence Harshada Vijay.

While Keishang looks at memory and traditions, Bhatia in "Archive of Impossible Exologies" reflects on their relationship with Schizophyllum commune, a resilient fungal species, and weaves together a narrative through colonial archives, living fungal cultures, and a living text.

The deeply personal collaboration with the mushroom has resulted in decomposing installations that respond to touch, breath, and time. Bhatia has also attempted to create a mycelial book that grows and rots and is subject to constant transformation.

"It’s a relationship that I have had with this fungus for many years and it has helped me understand the world a lot better. I have created a living text with it, I have created sculptures, spore prints of it, and just kind of think through how mycelium, which is basically the body of a fungus, gives us a different model of how we think of memory," the 31-year-old forager said.

The fungus, which can be commonly found across the world, has also made Bhatia connect with a place that would have been a strange setting otherwise -- similar to finding a kin at a new place.

"When I am in a new place where I am having a difficult time, and if I see it I feel settled that my kin is here. Someone I know is here," he added.

Anshumaan Sathe has delved on gender identity and sexual fantasies in their showcase, "Come Play With Me".

It is a series of intimate portraits emerging from conversations, letters, and sketching workshops with fellow trans people with an objective of normalising trans bodies and their sexualities.

"The larger mainstream narrative is about how we are having so much unnatural sex and there is a lot of shouting about that, there is very little meaningful conversation. For trans people, our body is something that we create and it can often feel like something that doesn’t belong to us," the 25-year-old said.

The week-long exhibition looks at masculinity and desire through dance in Anishaa Tavag's performance piece "Hi Bi Kadlekai", and investigates the overflow of digital images and the psychic residue they leave behind in Valia Russo's "Pediluve".

While Russo's work confronts the image-fatigue with acts of filtering and fragmentation, Tavag's dance reflects on fluid identity and the shapeshifting nature of desire, drawing from childhood stereotypes of Bollywood heroes.

Programmer-in-Residence Harshada Vijay said that at the heart of this year's curatorial thread is the idea of "chance", who observed early into the residency that all residents were engaging, whether consciously or intuitively, with the unknown: letting materials dictate form, inviting others into their processes, and opening up their work to the unpredictable.

"Chance became the quiet anchor of the residency. It revealed itself in experiments, in serendipitous meetings between mediums and artists, and in the space between control and surrender," she said.

The week-long showcase will feature a series of performances, walkthroughs, workshops, and conversations that invite the public to engage deeply with the residents’ evolving practices.

The open studio will come to an end on August 8. PTI MAH MAH MG MG