Serendipity Arts Residency 2023 Announcing the Residents!

The eminent Jury for this year has selected seven residents. For this edition, we are also excited to host one French artist as part of the Villa Swagatam initiative in partnership with the French Institute in India and the Embassy of France in India.

Salman is a visual practitioner from Srinagar. He is currently working as Artist-Mentor at Art1st Foundation. He has completed his Master’s in Visual Arts from Ambedkar University, Delhi, and his BFA in Applied Arts from Jamia Millia Islamia. Salman’s work responds to the discourses that surround the projection of Kashmiri subjecthood and landscape. His body of work looks into the violence of the everyday in time, memory, and space, which has led him to investigate sovereign power politics and its conceptual relations to death and life.

Surbhi’s work thrives at the intersection of music and art. She gravitates towards an intuitive understanding of sound guided by the listening practices of Pauline Oliveros & modular synth design. Interweaving melody, spoken word & field recordings with movement-based listening, she interprets philosophical concepts as sound pieces & installations.

Massandje is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montreuil. After training in acting and theatre, she began devoting herself entirely to the elaboration of her first one-woman show ‘Rapport sur ma vie antérieure de femme noire’ which deals with identity and discrimination. She wears several hats, including those of author and director. In 2022, she organised her first photo and video exhibition ‘Gusmas’, a project that interrogates experiences of queerness and racial identification in the suburbs, at the Boissière studio.

Dileep is an actor, contemporary dancer, choreographer, and theatre director from Kasaragod, Kerala. His works focus on finding new movement vocabularies by taking inspiration from his surroundings and life experiences. He is the founder of Chilanka Theatre Lab, which is a creative space for theatre and movement practitioners. Dileep has directed and acted in many plays and has choreographed several performances. He has worked with prominent theatre practitioners from India and across the world. Dileep has a postgraduate degree in Theatre Arts and graduated from the School of Drama and Fine Arts, Thrissur, Kerala. He also holds a Diploma in Movement Arts, from the Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts, Bangalore.

Richa completed her BFA in Sculpture from Kurukshetra University in 2018 and her MFA in Sculpture from Delhi College of Art in 2020. She has been part of the Khoj Peers residency in 2022. Some of her solo exhibitions have taken place at Triveni Gallery (supported by the Raza Foundation); Young Collectors’ Week part of the India Art Fair 2023; Carpe Arta, Mumbai (2022); Space118 Mumbai (2022); The Lexicon Art Gallery, New Delhi (2022); Artincept Gallery, New Delhi(2022). Richa received the Dahanukar All India Merit Award (2021).

Sewali’s work reflects on the visuals and affective spectrum informing rural lifestyles and cultures. Her practice engages with the farming practices of the region, the vagaries of indigenous food, and village life at large. A range of traditional and indigenous techniques have influenced the visual vocabulary in her work, especially the collective model of work often espoused by farmers and craftspeople. Sewali’s identity as a woman as well as a member of the farming community shapes much of her creative journey which folds indigenous materials and multiple new media like film and photography within itself.

Shivani studied history of art and visual culture at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Combining criticism, intellectual history, and visual studies, her MPhil dissertation examined speculative practices in contemporary art. She presently works in museums.