Hello Readers!

India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) is back with news on our grantees and their projects between August and October, 2016!

During this period, grants were awarded to diverse projects under our Arts Practice programme, such as the building of a storytelling-online-gaming environment, a theatre production based on science fiction, an arts symposium on a stalwart in the arts, and an investigation into the design and style of Little Magazines. These grants represent a small portion of the many unique explorations being undertaken in arts practice across the country.

Our Arts Education programme in this period also packed in workshops and events, and made grants to artists working in Government Schools in Karnataka. Artists from varied backgrounds like theatre, visual arts, and music will lead stimulating sessions with students on understanding the local environment and cultural practices, folk music forms, recycling and repair towards sustainability, encouraging reading through engagement with music, theatre and dance, and exercises in the visual and literary arts.

The Archival and Museum Fellowships initiative forged new collaborations with two museums, the Kerala Museum, Kochi and the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sanghralaya, Bhopal and made three fellowships, to activate the museum space.

The Arts Research programme convened the evaluation panel, and we will be announcing the new grants in our forthcoming newsletter. Watch this space!

We are happy to have facilitated many thrilling journeys in the arts, and for the opportunity to witness these fascinating outcomes from critically engaged and experimental projects. We hope that you will be a part of this journey by joining us at our various events across the country. In the past few months, to showcase the work of our grantees, we organised a contemporary dance performance in Madurai, and brought vignettes of museum exhibitions from Kargil and Delhi to Bangalore. We also conducted Open Houses, which are interactive sessions on everything related to our grant programmes, at Agartala and Imphal, and opened our offices to the public for our monthly engagement with the arts, MaathuKathe/Conversations.

The latest call for proposals for artists to work in Government Schools in Karnataka under our Arts Education programme is now out, and we continue to welcome proposals under our Arts Practice programme through the year. Do read on to know more on the applications process, meet some of our grantees and their projects, and read about their eventful journeys in the arts.

Please do visit our website or follow us on Twitter and facebook for updates!

We hope you enjoy the contents of this newsletter.
We would love to hear from you! You can write to us at contactus@indiaifa.org with any feedback that you may have.

Warmly,
The IFA Team

This year the Arts Research programme received over 325 enquiries in multiple languages, from across the country, in response to our last call for proposals in March, 2016. With over a 100 final proposals, 18 were finalised for consideration by the evaluation panel. The panel this year comprised editor, art critic, and educator Sadanand Menon, critic of art, theatre and film Samik Bandyopadhyay, and composer, singer, lyricist, actor, screenwriter and film theorist, Madan Gopal Singh. The panel’s spirited discussions, with interviews with some of the potential grantees for clarifications on certain aspects of their project, made for an engaging session reflecting on the wide breadth of interests displayed by our arts communities. On their recommendations we have decided to make 10 grants this year.

The Arts Research Panel at the IFA Office, Bangalore

Do lookout for our forthcoming Newsletter with details of the final projects!

The Arts Practice programme observed a period of energetic activity with many events in uncommon spaces, and grants awarded to imaginative explorations in literature, theatre, design, and aesthetics.

Writer and game designer Dhruv Jani received support to build the imaginary world of Kayamgadh, the world of storytellers. Kayamgadh, populated by characters who interrogate ideas of colonial history through an online gaming narrative, is influenced by the works of major international authors. The immersive experience pushes the boundaries of both literary fiction and interactive gaming. The outcome of the grant will be available free for download on gaming sites.

Production still from the game environment under construction by designer Dhruv Jani

Artist N Pushpamala received a grant towards the organisation of an international symposium on K Venkatappa, a seminal figure in early modern Indian art. The symposium attempts to create a rich tapestry of research, debate and discourse around the life and work of the artist, through a study of his aesthetic innovations, flaws and contradictions. Locating Venkatappa in his contemporary context, the seminar will also explore early modernism in Karnataka, filling a lacuna in the history of Indian art. The seminar will take place in Bangalore between November 25 and 27, 2016, do sign up for our emails for more information closer to the date!

Theatre director Shena Gamat received a grant to create an interactive play, Snakes, based on an adaptation of James Alan Gardner’s science fiction novel Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream. The play examines how ‘otherness’ is manufactured, magnified and fostered in human societies, probing a question that continues to evolve worryingly in our country today. It will be performed in non-conventional venues like community halls, schools, colleges and independent theatre spaces in Delhi to facilitate interactions with audiences who usually don’t watch theatre.

Editor, designer and publisher of Little Magazines, Susnato Chowdhury received support to conduct a two-phase workshop investigating the design and editing practices of Bengali Little Magazines, at a time when digital designing and desktop publishing is becoming the norm. A book and an exhibition of the materials of the workshop will catalogue these sessions, where young practitioner participants work with mentor experts to create new aesthetic experiments.

Our Request for Proposals for the Arts Practice programme is open all year round, please do visit our website for more information, and apply with your projects!

The Arts Education programme at IFA supports artists and teachers to work in Government Schools in Karnataka, conducts training workshops for teachers, and organises block level events for teachers, principals and officials from the Education Department.

This quarter observed an art-integrated block level event and four training workshops. The block level event was held at Sogal, Belagavi district, for 38 teachers from 27 schools, with the aim of informally introducing art-integrated pedagogy. Block Resource Persons, assistant teachers, as well as members of the local community were joined by teachers who have previously received grants from IFA to work on arts education programmes in their schools. They shared their individual journeys during the three day event. The training workshops, with 168 participants in total, were organised for administrators, headmasters, and special teachers working in Belagavi and Kalaburgi Divisions. Participants built vocabulary skills and enriched their comprehension and writing, through drama techniques, such as movement, story dramatisation and character development. These workshops focussed on exploring the various facets of integrating the arts into everyday curricula, with examples to demonstrate the impact of arts-integrated learning.

We also extended our support to 5 different projects from artists.

Theatre practitioner Anuradha H R received support for an initiative that seeks to bolster and build reading and writing abilities in the students of the Government High School, Jayanagar, Bangalore. She hopes to unpack works of literature for children in Kannada and English, through visual art, music, theatre and dance, to pique their curiosity and encourage reading. A presentation and exhibition of text-inspired work created by the students will be the outcome of the project.

Artist Aparna Deshpande received support to grow a kitchen garden in the Government Primary School, Vijayanagar, Belgaum, towards understanding and celebrating the cultural and linguistic diversity of the school and its context with its mix of Kannada and Marathi. Students will engage with local farming practices through songs, stories and painting. The outcome of the grant will be the kitchen garden patch in the school, a local farming calendar rendered as a series of miniature paintings, and a series of performances built around farming practices of the region.

Basavalingayya S Hiremath, a folk artist, received support to teach the various interpretations of Sobane Pada, Gigi Pada, Tatva Pada and other festival songs of Northern Karnataka with the sixth grade students of the Government Higher Primary School, Saptapura, Dharwad. He will employ an in-depth participant-trainer method, with the outcome featuring the students in several public performances.

Visual artist Channakeshava Koffee, received a grant for a series of exercises in the visual arts – drawing, painting and design – and storytelling, with the students, staff and the local community from the network of cluster schools at Ikkebeelu, Marathi, Murralli, Udakisara and Holagaaru, Shimoga District. The outcome will be exhibitions and performances for the school and community.

One of the sites of visual artist Channakeshava Koffee's engagements at Ikkebeelu, Marathi, Murralli, Udakisara and Holagaaru, Shimoga District

Theatre practitioner Purna Sarkar and visual artist Antara Mukherji received support for a collaborative project to engage students with ideas of repair and reuse, at the Government High School, Jeevan Bhima Nagar, Bangalore. Through interactive sessions with mechanics from local repair shops, the students will learn about the culture of recycling, and gain the skills required to repair and re-use objects of everyday use. The outcome of the grant will be a play created out of the learnings gleaned from these interventions.

Our Request for Proposals for Artists to work in Government Schools in Karnataka is currently out. Do visit our website for more information.

The Arts Education Programme for the year 2016-17 is supported by Citi India.

The Archival and Museum Fellowships initiative of IFA is a collaborative programme with a host museum or archive that opens up its collection to a curator, artist or researcher to activate the space. The selected fellows will represent the material in the collection through contemporary perspectives, and organise exhibitions and events to make the space accessible to the public. In this period we built two such collaborations with the Kerala Museum, Kochi and the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sanghralaya, Bhopal.

The Kerala Museum was established by R Madhavan Nayar, entrepreneur and philanthropist with a collection that is representative of important milestones in the world of visual art from all over India. Beginning with Raja Ravi Verma, Rama Verma, and Abanindranath Tagore, the collection includes artists from Shantiniketan; the Bengal School; those who were part of the Progressive Movement like M F Husain, F N Souza, Akbar Padamsee, as well as contemporary ones. With a view to increasing public awareness of the beautiful museum and its rich collection, researcher Supriya Menon received a fellowship to envisage and curate a series of activities for both adults and children. Her initial research has given birth to a plethora of possibilities which will take place at the museum space over the next few months.

Images of art from the eclectic and extensive collection at the Kerala Museum

The Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sanghralaya, Bhopal is an ethnographic museum which demonstrates the aesthetic qualities of India's traditional life styles, local knowledge and mores, and cautions against unprecedented destruction of ecology, environment, local values, and customs, etc. This charged environment will be further galvanised by the work of two fellows who received support from IFA to work in this space.

Researcher Abeer Gupta received a fellowship to study the role, relevance and meaning of the ethnographic object in the contemporary world. To accomplish his objective, he will create an intersection between a given ethnographic collection and the community it belongs to, at a point where the community itself has shifted to an alternate location or is scattered across numerous locations. The outcome of this fellowship will be an exhibition and an essay.

Visual artist Rathin Barman received a fellowship to visually explore the relationship between an ethnographic object and a displaced community that is at odds with the traditional ways of life and living. The outcome will be an exhibition of objects from the museum, interspersed with new artwork created by Barman, based on the conversations and memories of people he has interviewed from the community.

The Archival and Museum Fellowship initiative for the years 2015 – 2018 is supported by the Tata Trusts.

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At IFA we organise events to showcase the work of our grantees, Open Houses, which are informative sessions introducing IFA, and monthly MaathuKathe/Conversation sessions, where we open our offices to the public and invite an artist or researcher who is not an IFA grantee to share their work.

We organised a panel discussion Connecting with Collections: A Presentation of Two Museum Exhibitions on August 25, 2016 in Bangalore with Latika Gupta, Abeer Gupta and Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan. The discussion focussed on the ways in which the three curators made collections accessible to the public, at the Munshi Aziz Bhat Museum of Central Asian & Kargil Trade Artifacts, Kargil and the National Museum, New Delhi.

The panel discussion, Connecting with Collections A Presentation of Two Museum Exhibitions, at The Park, Bangalore

We presented Conditions of Carriage on September 28, 2016 in Bangalore, and on October 01, 2016 in Madurai. The unique performance by dancer and choreographer Preethi Athreya and team, captured the mechanics of the body, as a group of people negotiated the force of gravity within their bodies - through the act of jumping.

Performance of Conditions of Carriage at the Arul Anandhar College, Madurai

We brought the IFA Open House to two venues on September 29, 2016 at Agartala, and October 02, 2016 at Imphal. The IFA Open Houses are informative and informal sessions where programme executives talk about IFA, and the grant process over a cup or two of chai!

IFA Open House at Books & Coffee, Imphal

We organised three MaathuKathes, meaning Conversations in Kannada, with Tamaasha Theatre, Mumbai, Vikram Sridhar, and Shwetal Bhatt. Tamaasha Theatre presented Blank Page, a celebration of contemporary Indian poetry through theatre, music, and movement, directed by thespian Sunil Shanbag. Vikram lead us through an evening of interactive storytelling, recalling a time when dusk meant tales under an open sky. We screened the film Ramji Thakkar Bhimji Thakkar - on Navratri and Garba, the folk dance of Gujarat, capturing the energy of Navratri in the cultural city of Baroda. The director of the film, Shwetal, joined us for an exciting discussion post the screening.

MaathuKathe - (Top Left) Members of Tamaasha Theatre perform Blank Page; (Top Right) Shwetal Bhatt in discussion; (Bottom) Vikram Sridhar in an interactive storytelling session

IFA launched Catalyst – Arts an Inspiration for Excellence, in November, 2015. Catalyst is a unique initiative, which brings together 8 eminent artists, who will share their experiences about their pursuit of excellence, at corporate venues. As part of this initiative, we have partnered with corporate houses, including Biocon Limited, Sasken Communication Technologies, Centum Electronics, Cisco Systems Inc, and Titan Company Limited. Artists Atul Dodiya, Nandita Das, Arundhati Nag, Romi Khosla, Raghu Rai, Malavika Sarukkai, Aditi Mangaldas, Jitish Kallat, Sanjna Kapoor and Shekar Gupta have conducted sessions, talking about their individual journeys, in various spaces.

Malavika Sarukkai talks about her journey with the arts at Centum, Bangalore

If you would like to know more about this initiative, or partner with us, please contact: joyce@indiaifa.org

Upcoming Events

We look forward to seeing many of you in the audience at our upcoming events!

On December 03, 2016 we will screen The Common Task, by Pallavi Paul and Sahej Rahal, at Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum. The Common Task is an experimental HD video film on the Mars One project, which aims to set up the first human settlement in Mars.

Visual artist Surekha Sharada will present on her latest explorations on December 05, 2016 at our MaathuKathe/Conversations session for December.

For more details on these events, do sign up for our emails here, follow us on facebook or Twitter for regular updates, or simply tune into our website at: www.indiaifa.org/events

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We invite proposals for our Arts Practice and Arts Education programmes.

Arts Practice
Call for Proposals [No Deadline]
Arts Education
Call for Proposals from Artists to work in Government Schools, Karnataka [Deadline: December 10, 2016]

Do write to the individual programme officer for any queries on the programme, application process, and more:
Arts Practice: sumana@indiaifa.org & shubham@indiaifa.org
Arts Education: krishna@indiaifa.org

Do apply and spread the word!

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We have an interesting set of publications to offer which include postcards featuring our grantees' work, books and back issues of our magazine Art Connect. You can avail of special anniversary discounts on Limited Edition collections. All the proceeds from the sale of publications go back into grantmaking.
To know more, write to contactus@indiaifa.org

IFA POSTCARDS! Own a set today! Suggested contribution: Rs 200 For details, write to contactus@indiaifa.org	Beyond the Proscenium Reimagining the Space for Performance Edited by Anmol Vellani 176 pp., Rs 300, US $20 Click here to buy online. Mail: contactus@indiaifa.org	Embroidering Futures: Repurposing the Kantha Edited by Ritu Sethi 192 pp., Rs 400, US $30 Click here to buy online. Mail: contactus@indiaifa.org	20 years: Limited Edition - Set of 9 ArtConnect back issues Buy Now at Rs 700 only Click here to know more. To buy ArtConnect, write to contactus@indiaifa.org
	Buy both and get a discount of Rs 100! Click here to know more.

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IFA: Your project has moved beyond the attempt to represent one village at the crossroads of globalisation, Khirki in Delhi, to talk about the culture of hip hop and b-boying across the city, how did that shift happen?

Samreen and Shabani: Over the early half of the grant period, while spending time with the dancers in Khirki village, we started hearing things. That you know, the boys at Pulbangash in East Delhi, they do this fantastic Toprock. All because one of them has a job so he can get a 3G data pack. And they learn it from Youtube. So we took the metro to Rithala, watched Delhi rise up in endless matchbox constructions, lie low in junk metal graveyards, and finally met them. And then, we met the boys who practiced at Central Park in Connaught Place, before they left to collect clothes to wash from their basti. Then we met the boys in Sector 4, RK Puram, who practice after they serve hungry customers at the Chinese restaurant in Malviya Nagar. And then, someone said, "this is not it. You have to meet Ticko. He is a legend". So, we did. And then they said, "you have to meet Runjun, he has just moved into a small room somewhere in South Delhi – but he doesn't like fame. He lives the 'true hiphop life". The film we set out to make had just become larger than what we had imagined. Khirki, by itself, is now a part of a heaving metropolis that serves as a backdrop to a particular kind of response to urbanisation. It's 'the hip hop life', as boys in resettlement colonies understand it, adapt it, and celebrate it across the city. We decided to let the film, and the dance movement takes us where it will, and it's taken us everywhere. The film as it stands, is now not just about Khirki, but about a new way cities shape aspiration and rebellion.

IFA: What do you think dance does for/in the marginal communities that have embraced these forms?

Samreen and Shabani: Pretty much what it does for any community, mainstream or marginal. It's a release and throws open questions of identity and conflict. However, as we realised during research and filming, here it is the community of dancers and rappers that are marginalised. They are at the periphery, invisible to the mainstream.

Emcee battle with bboy Shiv taking the floor

IFA: Who are the characters who populate your film, are there any anecdotes that you could share with us?

Samreen and Shabani: The characters and scenes range from Bhupinder aka Ticko, a reality TV star and a teacher to Nitish and Shubham, two boys who live and work at a dhobi ghat in Central Delhi. Aastik, the philosopher, scene maker. Sumko, one of the few B-girls in Delhi. The Republic Day celebration in Khirki village. The rap battle in Vaishali. The B Boy battle in RK Puram. The Nepali crew that calls itself 8 Hindus. And the city of Delhi as the most prominent character.

IFA: What do you think b-boying has contributed to their negotiations with identity?

Samreen and Shabani: The fertile soil of history and economics spread across the settlements of Delhi, is reminiscent of a point in time when the United States of America, followed by almost every capitalist economy in the world, was giving birth to a completely unfamiliar but instinctively accurate set of tools to a generation that was being asked to "skill up". They did, but not like the systemic forces wanted. We didn't meet any upper class hip hop artist in all of National Capital Region. As we were told, "The rich don't want to break their bones." That could be one part of the story. The rich hold their fragile limbs in greater esteem than those who live by it. Our deeply internalised caste system privileges the Brahmanical mind, over those who can walk on their hands, flip over and fly. How then, does one get seen by a society still suffering under a Brahmanical mind? By taking over their streets, their malls, their music video channels and telling them that their older systems of knowledge have all but disintegrated. Speaking truth to power, the second sacred tenet of hip hop, presumes power lies with the other, and hence speaking truth to it is a compulsory act. And this is where rap comes in. Ray, who works in a call centre in Gurgaon to support his family, speaks his truth in raps he scribbles passionately on recycled old notebooks. He talks about identity, resilience and class, and in the film, he does so in the middle of his home, in the middle of the street, in the middle of shiny Gurugram that casts its long shadow over every dream of his. Prabhdeep, MC and rapper from Tilaknagar, documents every act of casual violence in powerful Punjabi, raps about his Delhi -18, raps which talk about his mother being insulted by his school principle for non-payment of fees, his father throwing a brick from his balcony to break the skull of neighbourhood goons, of beloved friends he has lost to drugs. In rap and dance battles in shady bars where no one participating can afford the price of beer, they speak truth to power in metaphor and rage. As you see in the film, they curse each other's fathers for corrupting them with expectations, in this lane in Hauz Khas Village, right behind hipster central, where people waltzing in a sea of perfume sometimes wait and listen to what they are saying. They oblige by turning their boom box low, their voices high. Hip hop shares an uneasy relationship with the hipster scene, as we can see in the Hauz Khas sequence in Gali. It's an aspiration to belong to those who seem to live independent, creative lives, but it's abundantly clear that those lives are enabled by money, and hence they don't want to seem to want to belong to old privilege. Hence, a lot of raps in Delhi are about making it, getting rich, getting a car and showing it to the naysayers that see, I am NOT nothing.

Nitish, a popper, practises at a dhobi ghat

IFA: You also talk about the negotiations with masculinity in these spaces, what are these discussions, and how did they come to your notice?

Samreen and Shabani: Hip hop the world over is a male space. It's no different in India, or Delhi. But what we found interesting is, and what some people said to us during the making of the documentary was how the dance battles evolved from, and replaced street fights. It's a legitimate alternative to violent confrontations. Even the rap battles we attended are deeply misogynistic, and also seriously 'diss' each other's family pride etc. But at the end of it they shake hands, which is the most interesting part.

Which brings us to the brotherhood. The most important thing the scene has given these young boys is the feeling that they have a community, somebody who gets them, has their back. And it usually is a fellow rapper or dancer. Somebody who totally gets how hard it is to resist and want the mainstream, all at the same time.

IFA: You mention the use of smart phones and technology by the younger inhabitants of this community, what do you think has been the role of technology and dance?

Samreen and Shabani: The role technology is playing in re-negotiating our terms with the world was visible in every frame of our film. We are still discovering what the ubiquitous screen means in how it's re-wiring access, aspiration and possibilities for those in whose hands these screens lie. It has meant the complete dissolution of geographical and linguistic boundaries; we watched children and young adults whose first language in Hindi, watching English documentaries on the philosophy of Hip Hop. Whatever was lost in language was made up for in their immense capacity to pick up the non-verbal signal. Knowledge, today, rides over airwaves and comes out of cheap earphones at 720 p, to anybody with a data connection of a few hundred a month.

Member of The Hindus bboy group shows his moves at a metro station

IFA: How easy/or difficult was it to work with the community, and tell their stories without losing their perspective?

Samreen and Shabani: Working with them was not so hard. Filming struggles like matching of timelines and availability is a part and parcel of every character driven project. The film is our interpretation of what we experienced and filmed.

IFA: Please could you tell us more about the filmmaking process itself? Please feel free to talk about any challenges, or any anecdotes that particularly struck you during this process.

Samreen and Shabani: We started working on this film in Khirkee, an urban village in south Delhi and soon realised that the scope was much larger and deeper. There was this movement creating an alternate history of the city. We wanted to see it from there and not make it mainstream the way most hip hop is depicted today. So Delhi became a character in the film, not the Delhi that we usually see but the Delhi of these artistes, as seen from their rooftops, the DDA parks they practice in, the metro stations they are thrown out from and their rooms where they hole themselves in to dance or write that rap for 16 -17 hours at a stretch. One of the challenges for us has been finding a language to experience the form of Hip Hop in Delhi. We wanted to not succumb to the popular tropes of how hip hop is shown.

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India Foundation for the Arts makes grants to artists, scholars and institutions throughout the year. For all these exciting projects to take shape, we have to constantly raise funds. We would like to thank our donors who have supported us and made the many projects possible in the last few months.

You can support and engage with IFA in many ways—by becoming a Friend of IFA or a Donor Patron or even by sponsoring our fundraising events and by spreading the word about IFA. Every contribution counts.

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