Voicing the present

An online collective hopes to create deeper bonds between members of the art community.

Loss of human contact and connections during the pandemic has perhaps hit the art community the hardest. Interactions that used to take place at art previews and other events, studio visits, residencies and informal occasions have been either reduced significantly or are completely absent now, creating a sense of void while heightening physical distances.

In this backdrop, Serendip Art and The Hashtag#collective have come up with an online year-long programme that facilitates conversations between artists, art curators and writers. Titled ‘Voices’, the monthly series is an effort to establish and create deeper bonds between members of the art community. It has been conceived as a south India-based archival art platform to investigate the creative present through these conversations.

The idea and the series materialised as a result of a conversation between Ravi Cavale, Founder, Serendip Art, Bengaluru, and Parvathi Nayar, artist and member of the The Hashtag#Collective, based in Chennai. They both found merit in creating a platform that offers a space to artists and art writers to voice their concerns, discuss aspects of their practice and engage in meaningful interactions.

“All of us are living through a difficult, surreal, and collectively experienced time of human history, when it has never been more important to hear the voice of the artist, clear and strong,” they state passionately. Believing that it is critical to present and archive ‘Voices’ as a snapshot of these uncertain times, the team has been hosting, recording and archiving these conversations online. The idea is to engage the audience as well with meaningful content.

So far, two episodes have been held in the last two months, where the first conversation was between artist Shantamani Muddaiah and arts writer/curator Lina Vincent, while the second episode was between artist Shivani Aggarwal and me. Both artists elaborated on their unique explorations of material and media in their practice, and shared their thought processes regarding development of ideas, social and environmental perspectives and larger contexts. These conversations have offered valuable insights into their concerns, and helped in contextualising their art practices.

The other significant aspect has been the discussion around the pandemic and how it has affected artists, curators and writers on an individual level, its impact on their practices and how it has reflected in their work. This part of the conversation has created a sense of shared experience and history, and reiterated the points of intersections of a collective journey.

The next episode features the artists of the Kinetics collective in conversation with arts writer/historian Dr Ashrafi Bhagat.

The author is a Bangalore-based art consultant, curator and writer. She blogs at Art Scene India and can be reached on [e-mail]

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