For a visual artist to engage students, staff and the local community,from the network of cluster schools at Ikkebeelu, Marathi, Murralli, Udakisara and Holagaaru, Hosanagara Taluk, Shivamogga District in a series of exercises in the visual arts – drawing, painting and design –and storytelling. The outcomes will be exhibitions and performances for the school and community.
For an artist to use an in-depth participant-trainer method with the sixth grade students of the Government Higher Primary School, Saptapura, Dharwad, to teach the various interpretations of Sobane Pada, Gigi Pada, Tatva Pada and other festival songs of Northern Karnataka. The outcome will include several public performances.
For the creation of a kitchen garden in the Government Primary School, Vijayanagar, Belagavi which teaches in both Kannada and Marathi, towards understanding and celebrating cultural and linguistic diversity. Students will engage with local farming practices through songs, stories and local vocabulary; a local farming calendar will also be organised in the style of miniature paintings. The outcomes of the grant will be the kitchen garden patch in the school, the local farming calendar and a series of performances built around farming practices of the region.
For an initiative that will take about 30 children’s literature publications in Kannada and English to high school students at the Government High School, Jayanagar, Bangalore. Using an integrated approach that involves visual art, music, theatre and dance, this project seeks to build reading and writing abilities in the students. A presentation and exhibition of text-inspired work created by the students will be the outcome of the project.
For an international seminar on K Venkatappa, a seminal figure in early modern Indian art. Through the study of various bodies of Venkatappa’s work, their aesthetic innovations, flaws and contradictions, the seminar attempts to create a rich tapestry of research, debate and discourse around the life and work of Venkatappa. Locating him in his contemporary context, the seminar is expected to explore early modernism in Karnataka, filling a lacuna in the history of Indian art. The seminar will take place in Bangalore in November 2016.
For the creation of an interactive play based on a science fiction that questions the idea of ‘othering’. The play will be performed in non-conventional venues like community halls, schools, colleges and independent theatre spaces to facilitate interactions with audiences who usually don’t watch theatre. The outcome of the grant will be two runs of the play with five shows.
For a two-phase workshop enquiring into the design and editing practices of Bengali Little Magazines, at a time when digital designing and desktop publishing is becoming the norm. Young practitioner participants will work together with mentor experts to create new aesthetic experiments. The outcomes of the grant will be a book and an exhibition from the materials of the workshop.
For a game designer to experiment with pushing the boundaries of both literary fiction and interactive games. The narrative will build an imaginary location and characters to interrogate ideas of colonial history, influenced by the works of major international authors. The outcomes of the grant will be an interactive fiction piece that will be free for download from gaming sites and a few smaller builds which can be showcased in exhibitions
For the creation of a dance piece that reinterprets a traditional Bharatanatyam composition called Mohamana. In the context of its history and the current practice of Bharatanatyam where the woman’s body has been constructed through the male gaze, this work attempts to de-objectify the female dancer’s body by questioning and critiquing the deeply embedded representations of Indian feminity in performance and in everyday life. The outcome will be a performance that will premiere at the Kochi Biennale in December, 2016 and will continue to be performed at the Biennale up to March 2017.
For working with the collections at the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sanghralaya (IGRMS), Bhopal. The IGRMS is an ethnographic museum which demonstrates the aesthetic qualities of India's traditional life styles, local knowledge and mores, and cautions the people against unprecedented destruction of ecology, environment, local values, customs, etc. Rathin would like to explore, through his visual vocabulary, 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 artworks that Barman will create, based on the conversations and memories of people he has interviewed from the community
For working with the collections at the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sanghralaya (IGRMS), Bhopal. The IGRMS is an ethnographic museum which demonstrates the aesthetic qualities of India's traditional life styles, local knowledge and mores, and cautions the people against unprecedented destruction of ecology, environment, local values, customs, etc. Abeer intends to explore the role, relevance and meaning of the ethnographic object in the contemporary world. For this purpose he proposes to 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 will be an exhibition and an essay.
For support towards workshops engaging with the medium of street theatre, to sharpen the students’ thinking about their contexts, and build social and self-management skills. She will work with eighty students, from standards eighth to tenth, of the Sardar Patel Memorial Higher Secondary and High School in Hospet, Bangalore.
For support towards a series of exercises in the visual arts – drawing, painting and design – and storytelling, to sensitise the students to their environment. This project will be undertaken with forty students, from the sixth and seventh grades of the Government Model Primary School, in Hesaraghatta, Bangalore.
For a fellowship that enables research into the archives of Hemango Biswas with particular focus on the music, communication and collaboration between the two icons of the Assam IPTA movement, Hemango Biswas and Bhupen Hazarika between the 1940s and part of the1960s. The research will focus on the period during the linguistic riots in Assam in 1960, and unearth the important contribution that these two musicians made in confronting the conflict. The outcomes will be a monograph, and a CD/DVD recording of three important songs with genre-specific instruments and other political songs by Biswas and Hazarika.
For support to aurally map two archaeological sites - Nagarjunakonda in Andhra Pradesh and Guruvayoor Temple, Kerala – by recording their ambisonic properties, as a pilot project for a much larger exercise in India. The attempt is to both challenge the dominant visual understanding of history of these sites, as well as study the effects of industrialisation on listening practices. The larger exercise will include recordings for five more sites to be archived on a web platform, enabling users to recreate the listening experience of those sites with any recorded sound. While the outcome of this project is a film on the process of this pilot project, an audio installation accompanied by lecture-demonstrations is hoped for at the end of the larger exercise.
