We are pleased to bring you IFA news from the past three months. Since we have, over the years, funded dozens of research and documentation projects, the subject of archives is one which naturally interests us a great deal. Read below about two recent archiving-related interventions. Meanwhile, several IFA projects (involving performance, film, photography and installation art) have been in the public eye. Among them is Saba Dewan’s just-completed film on tawaifs called The Other Song. Scroll down to read an interview with Saba...
Performance has been the theme of several recent IFA grants. Some grantees are creating new performance pieces while others are working on performance as a subject of study and documentation. Manipur's Mangangsana Meitei, a balladeer and musician, is developing a performance based on the mythical story of Phou-Oibi. Puppeteer Varun Narain and ballet dancer Rea Krishnatraye are collaborating on a dance and puppetry combination called Giselle ki Kahani - an Indian version of the 19th century French ballet, while Thiruvananthapuram's Jyothish M G is working towards staging a Malayalam adaptation of Macbeth...
The past achievements and future directions of IFA’s decade-old Arts Education programme were recently the subject of an in-depth discussion. Our grants under this programme have supported a whole gamut of approaches to arts education. Research on teaching methodologies, sustained classroom interventions, and the creation of resources for arts education have been some of the areas covered. A review panel consisting of Ashoke Chatterjee, ex-Director, National Institute of Design, Maya Menon, Founder-Director of The Teacher Foundation, and Jeroo Mulla, senior teacher of Film Studies, conducted a comprehensive review of the programme...
In the last three months, IFA support has gone out to three new projects including an unusual new multi-disciplinary arts residency based in Bangalore called the Bengaluru Artist Residency or bar1. Christoph Storz, one of the organisers, says, describing the potential of bar1, "A residency can create, at
least for a moment, the nice illusion for an arriving guest that life is starting anew. Nothing is done, nothing is said yet. This is an unknown place in a maybe unknown town in an unknown air." Echoing him Parvez Kabir, critic-in-residence at Peers – another IFA-funded artists' residency...
In the last week of February, the first edition of IFA's New Performance Festival was held in Bangalore. The festival brought together four very different performances whose creation was funded under our New Performance programme. The idea behind the New Performance programme is to support
performance artists who take risks by, for example, drawing on different artistic genres and languages of performance. Platforms need to be created to showcase these productions and the festival thus becomes an important extension of the programme...
2007 ends with our Extending Arts Practice programme opening itself out to projects that look at contemporary art-making practices from the artist‟s point of view. Filmmaker Amit Dutta who is exploring the life and death of Gond artist, Jangarh Singh Shyam, is aware of the tentative nature of his questions and at the same time their crucial implication for his own practice...
IFA has a new public face in the form of the recently-launched arts magazine, ArtsConnect. We hope the magazine will reflect and celebrate the multi-disciplinary, eclectic and process-oriented nature of the work we have supported over the years. Our two hundredth grant has just gone out – before us now is a huge fund of ideas, objects and materials to draw upon and invite reflection on through the magazine. At the centre, of course, will be voices –not dry, impersonal ones but those speaking from the midst of the field or from the messy centre of art-making...
Ten years ago, a student at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIMB) asked one of his teachers – Prof. Ramnath Narayanswamy – “Why not a course on arts, business and ethics for management students?” Prof. Narayanswamy was impressed with the idea and turned to IFA for help in designing and offering such a programme. Since then, students at IIMB have been signing up in large numbers every year for a ten-week course called Tracking Creative Boundaries (TCB)...
The highlight at IFA in recent months was a colloquium on arts education that we coorganised with the movement arts centre Attakalari and co-funded with the Sir Ratan Tata Trust. Titled Accessing Arts Education: Possibilities and Challenges, this brought together policymakers, artists and arts educators. Having NCERT director, Krishna Kumar discuss the question of "How we have managed to keep the arts out of schools for 150 years?" alongside close-to-the ground accounts of working in the field of arts education was an eye-opening experience. Renowned performer Shubha Mudgal...
Welcome to IFA‟s first newsletter which comes to you at an exciting point in our history. We have supported 174 projects across the country over the last eleven years and are ready to venture into areas new to us. The core of our work remains grant-making, however, and in recent months we have
continued to fund projects under the two unique programmes we launched last year – Extending Arts Practice and New Performance...