https://scroll.in/article/948502/the-art-of-resistance-brendan-fernandess-mog-asundi-is-a-message-of-love
At the very end of an excruciatingly painful year punctuated by mass protests and the hateful politics of exclusion in so many places across the world, a very beautiful multidimensional artwork in Goa reminded us there still remain viable alternative ways of being and belonging. This was the India debut of Brendan Fernandes, at the fourth edition of Serendipity Arts Festival in Panjim, capping an extraordinary year for the 40-year-old Kenya-born Canadian-Goan. Earlier this year, the New York Times described his work at the Guggenheim’s Young Collectors Council spring gala as a “genre-bending and boundary-pushing method that melds dance with visual art.” A few months later, I got the chance to see his ‘The Master and Form’ at the Whitney Biennial, and found myself unexpectedly mesmerized by the 50-minute performance by ballet dancers who – as the sun set outside the magnificent floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Highline – gave us long moments of breathless tension interspersed with surpassing beauty. Fernandes told the New Yorker, “This piece is about creating empowerment. I’m a really nice master.” But it also invited persistent questions about where power lies in the art world, and that’s what played on my mind for a long time afterwards. Given that experience, it was quite surreal for me to collaborate and curate Brendan’s first-ever artwork for India, which dug deep into Goan culture to derive inspiration from the affectionate Konkani greeting (most often used in farewell) – Mog Asundi, which translates to “let there be love (between us)”. With regard to this lovely message of acceptance and inclusion, we thought it perfectly apt to spell it out in each of the five scripts regularly used to write Konkani: Devanagiri, Roman, Kannada, Malayalam, and Perso-Arabic (it is the only language in the world in regular use in so many different forms). With the unstinting support of Smriti Rajgharia, the Festival Director of Serendipity, we printed thousands of posters, tiles and t-shirts, which were distributed freely in Goa, most especially on the sidelines of the choreographed interventions that took place at four different festival venues. These choreographed performances by young dancers of the Goa Dance Residency provided me with my most sublime art experiences of 2019. The most memorable and meaningful took place in the stunning balcony of the Adil Shah palace on the Panjim waterfront, the 500-year-old architectural masterpiece that speaks to every layer of Goa’s civilizational ethos. On that very day, much of the rest of the country was riven by huge protests over the hateful politics of exclusion. But here, the dancers spread out to express themselves individually, as a scrum of onlookers gathered, and many more people wound their way through the area: waiters, customers, security guards, artists. Eventually, the dancers began to move as one, surging in each direction – but still leaving room for everyone doing whatever they wanted to do all around them. Here was an example for how we can find space for each other to live in some kind of self-respecting harmony. It was a lesson for the world, plumbed deep from Konkani culture. Mog Asundi, everyone.
