Arts Practice

Priyanka Chhabra


Project Period: One year

For the implementation of a Foundation Project by IFA under Productions, which will create an artist book that will reflect on the nature and relationship of personal archives to history. Titled My Voice Is As Brittle As The Paper You Write On, the book is imagined as a conversation between four imagined characters at the time of the Partition of Punjab in 1947. As an extension of the film Iqraar-naama, through documents from personal archives, drawings, text and photographs, the book will capture reflections, inflections, propositions and deliberations rethinking questions around how history is written and read. The outcomes from this project will be the artist book and an essay on the relationship of personal archives to history writing and making. The Project Coordinator's deliverables to IFA along with the final report will be the artist book, the essay, copies of drawings, text and photographs used in the book.  Project funds will pay for contract fees, printing and scanning, travel and living and archives fees.

Samyuktha Pritham Chakravarthy


Project Period: One year and six months

For the implementation of a Foundation Project by IFA under Productions, which will create a theatrical production titled The Mobile Girls Koottam. Set in a tea-shop built on a small truck, the performance will travel to various locations within Tamil Nadu and to Bangalore and Pondicherry facilitating conversation among actors and audiences around women's lives, their work, bodies and identities. There will be eight shows of the performance as part of this project. The outcomes from this project will be the performances, a travelogue booklet with sketches, photographs, and notes on experiences from the tour drawn from writings by the performers, crew and audience members, and audio-visual documentation of the tour that will be presented as episode/s on Youtube. The Project Coordinator's deliverables to IFA along with the final report will be the booklet, still and video documentation of the performances and the tour, and links to Youtube. Project funds will pay for contract fees, equipment hire, printing and publicity, materials, travel, food and props and costumes.

Amrita Barua


Project Period: One year and eight months

For the implementation of a Foundation Project by IFA under Productions, which will create a work of speculative fantasy eco-fiction centred around the ecology of the tidal sluice networks in Goa. Based on ongoing research into the estuarine geography, its history and architecture, the project will explore stories, materiality of the spaces, repair processes involved, tools and architecture of the sluices through intermedia works including drawing, writing, audio-visual materials, found objects and maps. It will also create the abstract characters Ngan and Nilnil representing the river and ocean respectively, and explore their journeys. The outcomes from this project will be an artist book, a journal documenting the course of the project, and a website consisting of textual and audio-visual essays and a series of drawings. The Project Coordinator's deliverables to IFA along with the final report will be the artist book, a copy of the journal, the essays and drawings, and a download of the website. Project funds will pay for contract fees, printing and publicity, equipment hire, travel and living, materials, props and costumes, purchase of books and subscriptions, and website hosting. 

Dhiraj Rabha


Project Period: One year and eight months

For the implementation of a Foundation Project by IFA under Productions, which will artistically investigate into the notions of home, displacement and identity of a people and a place as seen in the collective memory of the inhabitants of a camp set for surrendered members of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) in Assam Through engagements with memories, narratives, and everyday objects of community members, and resources from archives, the project intends to create a space for conversation that will facilitate a deeper understanding of narratives and positions within and outside the community. The outcome of this project will be a site-specific installation. The Project Coordinator's deliverables to IFA with the final report will be audio-visual documentation of the entire process and of the installation. Project funds will pay for contract fees, travel and living, materials, equipment hire, and printing and publicity.   

Poonam Gautam Jain


Project Period: One year and ten months

For the implementation of a Foundation Project by IFA under Productions, which will explore the politics of hierarchies and erasures of languages through a study of five scripts namely Mahajani, Modi lipi, Tamil numerals, Devanagari and Kannada. Titled Degrees of Exclusion of Languages, this project will attempt to understand linguistic divide as a core dimension of the national education enterprise and a crucial axis of negotiation within our public domain and democracy. It will explore cultural dilemmas and strategies of survival that languages have struggled with. The outcomes from this project will be a set of three-dimensional physical and digital letterpress moveable types for all the five scripts, letterpress prints, lithographs on paper, and a booklet that catalogues all the letters in these scripts in the form that they have existed so far. The Project Coordinator's deliverables to IFA along with the final report will be the digital models, a set of physical letterpress types, copies of the lithographs, copies of the letterpress prints and the catalogue will be the deliverables from this project to IFA.  Project funds will pay for materials, contract fees, studio hire, travel and living. 

Deepa Dhanraj


Project Period: One year and six months

For the implementation of a Foundation Project by IFA under Productions, which will explore the outbursts of artistic responses to the unfortunate death of Rohith Vemula, the circumstances that led to his death, and his suicide note. Anchored around this historic moment and its political and cultural ramifications with respect to the anti-caste movement in India, this project intends to enable conversations with select filmmakers, writers, poets and musicians who engaged deeply with Rohith’s letter. The outcome of this project will be a 60-minute film tentatively titled Speaking to Rohith.  The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be the film. Project funds will pay for travel and living, contract fees, equipment hire and studio hire.

This Grant was amicably cancelled based on reasons mutually agreed upon by the Grantee and IFA due to unavoidable circumstances.

Srilata Krishnan


Project Period: One year and three months

For the implementation of a Foundation Project by IFA under Productions that will lead to the creation of sixty poems based on the interior lives of key women characters from the epic Mahabharata. Structured as quasi-dramatic monologues, nesting within the narrative frame of prose passages, this body of imaginative poetic literature seeks to probe into the many dimensions of these characters that have largely remained invisible and unexamined within extant interpretations. In doing so, the work will creatively dialogue with existing tellings and retellings of the Mahabharata. The outcome of this project will be a manuscript containing the narrative prose and the sixty poems. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be this manuscript. Project funds will pay for travel and living, contract fees, communication, printing and stationery, and purchase of books.

Nakul Singh Sawhney


Project Period: Six months

For the implementation of a Foundation Project by IFA under Workshops, Residencies, Seminars, which will create workshops for young people from rural contexts to practice non-fiction filmmaking skills that will empower them to tell their own stories, in the socio-political context of North India. The outcomes of the project are the workshops, including individual sequences prepared by each participant and non-fiction short films that they will make in groups. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be photographs, audio-visual documentation of the workshops, the individual sequences, and the non-fiction short films. Project funds will pay for contract fees, food, travel and living, materials, and stationery.

Ashavari Majumdar


Project Period: Six months

For the implementation of a Foundation Project by IFA under Workshops, Residencies, Seminars, that will create a residency for movement artists and filmmakers to collaboratively explore a language for the practice of the Indian dance-film, with a focus on non-classical and marginalised movement forms. The outcome of the project is the residency and the dance-films that will result from the collaborations. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be photographs, audio-visual documentation of the residency and the dance-films. Project funds will pay for travel and living, food, hire of equipment, contract fees, materials and hire of venue.

Mahalakshmi Prabhakar and Aranyani Bhargav


Project Period: One year and three months

For the implementation of a Foundation Project by IFA under Arts Platforms which will curate a series of 12 to 15 sessions of discussion on the online platform titled Re-Cognising Dance. Propelled by a need to create a healthy and safe space for building dance scholarship in India, this series hopes to build robust and stimulating conversations on neglected themes, bridge the classical-folk divide, and provide access to resources, collaborations, scholars and mentors in the field of dance. The outcomes from this project will be the 12 to 15 virtual sessions of discussion and a website that will be a repository of textual and audio-visual materials. The Project Coordinators’ deliverables to IFA with the final report will include recordings of the sessions of discussion and a download of the website. Project funds will pay for contract fees, zoom and canva subscriptions, and website domain and hosting. 

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