https://www.navhindtimes.in/2022/12/18/magazines/panorama/serendipitous-opportunities/
Considering the minuscule scale of Panjim, and the giant ambitions of the Serendipity Arts Festival that has already played out citywide four times previously (during which time I myself curated three exhibitions in six venues) it’s absolutely astonishing how this now-well-established event continues opening up new heritage spaces for culture. That is certainly the case in 2022, with some outstanding winners already immediately apparent. Before everything gets dismantled by the end of this week, I highly recommend visiting the refurbished Excise Building (roughly opposite Clube Nacional) and the lovely Post Office Museum opposite the GPO. It must be acknowledged that events of such size are inherently complicated for city residents, and strain the already overburdened infrastructure of Panjim which is simultaneously beset by the destructive caprices and deeply dubious motivations of so-called “Smart City”. In combination, the two have produced something truly surreal: full-scale “feast bazaar” blending in and around Serendipity artworks, set up in an egregious moonscape of dug-up roads. As a result, one cannot be sure, at first or even second glance, what has been planned or simply occurred accidentally. The entire city feels like an abstruse installation. My recommendation for coping is the spell-binding *Orientalist Archives: Indo-British Painting in Colonial India* at the Post Office Museum. We must hope the concerned authorities - notably Sudhir Jakhere, the excellent Senior Superintendent of Post Offices (Goa) - will urgently ensure the exhibition stays open for at least another month, so that as many citizens as possible can savour this curatorial masterwork by the eminent art historian Dr. Jyotindra Jain with Jutta Jain-Neubauer. Their main wall text explains how the “so-called Company School is a mélange of various visual styles and expressions, but it is so-called as these paintings were mostly patronized by the officials of the British as well as other European East India Companies operating in India from the mid-18th to the end of the 19th century, spilling over into the early 20th. Executed in miniature format, the paintings were done on paper or sheets of mica with water-based pigments. The main centres of their production included: Trichinopoly, Madras, Madurai, Tanjore, Malabar, Coorg and Mysore (in the South); Murshidabad, Patna, Calcutta, Benaras, the Oudh region with Faizabad and Lucknow (in Eastern India); and Delhi, Agra, and the Punjab region (in Northern and Western India).” Across this scattered grab-bag of sources, the wall text says “artists trained themselves to construe their subjects through the eyes of their European patrons instilling in their commissioned works an anticipated sense of wonder, distance, aversion and power. In doing so, they dramatized and tableau-ized the everyday, excerpting each theme from its larger visual context which, in combination with their own amateur painterly skills, effected a charming naïveté, as if matching it with their patrons’ fleeting impressions of Indian life. More than their stylistic unity, these paintings cohere on account of their synoptic representation of India as observed by the alien patrons, and as a result, adhered to by the artists.” This is the notorious “colonial gaze” reducing every “native” to status, profession, and usefulness to the project of extracting resources. The artists also very obviously “self-Orientalized” by exotifying their commonplace, in profound and pervasive ways. In this way, their work “clearly share[s] the huge bulk of the equally type-casting texts that were written in the period under the rubric of “People of India” or “Tribes and Castes of India” series, or the colonial Census or Gazetteers of India [and] became a sort of knowledge bank of Hindu paganism, a reference archive for Christian missionaries as well as an exotic visual account of the ‘monstrous’ deities of the Other.” Look closely at these utterly beautiful objects however- I was bowled over by the luminous paintings on mica – and you will detect other impulses: slyness, indifference, badinage. These are important reminders that agency is inherently fluid, and can cascade unpredictably between artist and patron, even from ostensible “colonizer” to the supposed “colonized.” We know the latter happened uproariously completely in Goa, which experienced an extraordinary cultural efflorescence – what we now celebrate as Goan art, architecture, music, cuisine – in the same exact period other Indians in every part of the subcontinent were trapped in “Company School” caricatures. These facts are both undeniable, and still perplexingly absent in the popular imagination: Goa had a hugely different 19th century to any other colonized territory in South Asia. Across generations at that time, Goans gained and exercised considerable freedoms that the rest of India could not manage to achieve until 1947. Nonetheless, it is also true the world views in Portuguese India and British India were always inextricably interconnected, especially in aesthetics and visual culture. This is why *Orientalist Archives* is uncannily well suited in lovely São Tomé, where its “flow” proceeds seamlessly both inside and outside the building, in one of the most profoundly satisfying and sublime exhibition experiences I have ever encountered. Also highly memorable is what is happening in the old Excise Building, where generations of Goans have wrangled with bureaucratic obduracy. That context fuels unexpected synchronicity with *The Office of Mass Resignation* (created by a Sri Lankan collective of artists), which includes highly realistic counters for complaints, and another one for them to be denied. The verisimilitude to the original milieu is initially mind-boggling, then endlessly hilarious. It’s good fun, but make sure to set aside at least one full hour for *Who Is Asleep Who Is Awake*, curated by Sudarshan Shetty across the upper floor. The enigmatic Bombay-based artist is known for his own multidimensional practice, in painting, sculpture, installation, video, sound and performance, but here is a curatorial tour-de-force, spanning genres and formats, which persuasively pushes the envelope of what is possible – or even admissible- in art world events like this one. *Who Is Asleep Who Is Awake *stunned me with its incredibly timely inclusion of the Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi’s 22-minute short film *Hidden*, about “a girl with a golden voice who is forbidden to sing by the Iranian authorities”. It is almost certainly the first time this all-time cinema great (who is himself currently imprisoned in Tehran) has been exhibited in this kind exhibition space, to these kinds of viewers, and marvellously follows IFFI’s screening of his new No Bears, to huge acclaim just last month, just up the Mandovi riverfront. Just one more special recommendation: it was palpably eerie to see Abir Karmakar’s photorealist paintings sliding unobtrusively into this ex-bureaucratic building's most humdrum corners. They fit like organic accretions, rooted by sheer ordinariness. There is so much belonging, and such harmony, but also an unfortunate twist. Quite understandably, because they’re coming back after two tortuous pandemic years, this marvellous festival has not managed to do quite everything that is desirable. It was thus unfortunate to realize neither Sudarshan Shetty or the Jains had been adequately briefed about the rich cultural history of the buildings and neighbourhoods into which they delivered such delights. This is 2022, and we all have to be better in this regard. There can be no doubt Serendipity Arts Festival has created its own blueprint for one of the world’s premier public cultural bonanzas. Here is one more area where they must ensure the best practices of the future will emerge.