Food histories, conversations and public art projects highlighted Serendipity Arts’ presence at the India Art Fair

Serendipity Arts was present at booth K 1 and the Food Lab, which brought together glimpses of its public art project, called In Praise of Shadows by Julien Segard, featured in the festival along with the Food Lab, which had Cook and See, exhibits and findings presented by Akash Muralidharan, and conversations with Elizabeth Yorke and Anusha Murthy who presented their project the Library of Edible Issues.

Derived from the project the ‘Case of Missing Vegetables’, the concept for the ‘Cook and See’ challenge arose from the desire to find out why several vegetables from SamaithuPaar (A Tamil vegetarian cookbook from the 1950s) are not present in our kitchens anymore. Why have some of these vegetables fallen off our plates? The idea behind the project was to cook with underused vegetables using traditional recipes suggested in the book and try to understand the reason behind a lot of them missing from our daily diet. The project and its findings will be collated as a book or an online repository accessible by the public, which can help us all understand the fact that the food on our plate is part of a bigger socio-economic construct.

Also, as a part of the Food Lab, The Library of Edible Issues by Elizabeth Yorke and Anusha Murthywascurated based on questions that arise about the food system. The project through live conversations garnered public opinion and facilitated the exchange of points of view, to better understand what our food futures might look like. It potentially created spaces for collaboration, taking a step closer to solving some of the major food-related issues that affect us every day, explored through agriculture, human labor, environmental sustainability, politics, trade, ethics, policy, culture, and business.

Booth K1 featured a project by Julien Segard, who presented In Praise of Shadows, a work that was part of public Art Grant at Serendipity Arts Festival 2022 titled ‘The Island That Never Gets Flooded’, which invited nominations from artists based in Goa to create new interventions and immersions using sites, localities, and technology through interdisciplinary practices in the city of Panjim. Segard’s project is a two-channel video installation that has been shot entirely at night over a period of 3 months across Panaji, Old Goa, and Mapusa. The narrative emerged out of nights spent roaming on the edges of a territory, examining the legacies of power, religion, violence, and resilience through the relics of ancient and modern history, probing the logic that encapsulates time.

Finally, the participation also showcased and brought to light the essays written by writers from across India on select curatorial projects from past editions of the Serendipity Arts Festival, titled Projects/Processes. Along with this, an anthology of essays written around various topics related to the arts derived from the online blog, Write, Art, Connect, as well as a new publication in collaboration with the Smart Museum of Art titled Imaginable Worlds: Art, Crisis and Global Futures which was commissioned during the pandemic as a collection of essays offering a creative look at crises past, present, future, and speculative.

Talking about the participation, Smriti Rajgarhia, Director, of Serendipity Arts Foundation & Festival, said, “It was nice to be back at the India Art Fair, with select projects from our Festival around food systems, history, public art spaces and a collection of our research publications. As an institution, we believe in sparking conversations that help the public engage with the arts. Through our projects at the art fair, we aimed to create spaces for dialogue and engagement with the arts.

–IANS