Congratulations to the winners!
Goa Open Arts is pleased to announce the 6 recipients of the Catalyst Grants 2021. With the intention of providing ongoing support to the artistic community of Goa, the Catalyst Grant will provide bursaries of INR 50,000 to 5 of the awardees as single artists or collectives for developing a new or ongoing art project. An additional 6th artist is supported in the lens based project category with a bursary of 1,00,000, in partnership with the Nazar Foundation, India. In addition to the monetary support and access to mentorship opportunities, the 6 grantees will have their work exhibited at the next Goa Open Arts public programme scheduled to take place in March 2022.
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Goa Open Arts is also please to introduce the first edition of the ENGAGE GRANT which aims to support community based projects through their artistic practice. The award of INR 50,000 for the ENGAGE GRANT 2021 will be announced very soon.
CATALYST GRANT 2021-22 AWARDEES
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Farah Mulla
Farah Mulla is a multimedia artist based in Goa. Her background in science overlaps with her art practice to explore the perception of sound and its effects on human neurology and subjectivity.
She explores the way technologies and relationships that arrive from the human body expand into a multisensorial form of haptics today as we begin to navigate the world through a virtual form of existence and pine for responses from machines and algorithms, as much as we do (or perhaps even less) from human warmth. Farah's research experiments with sensory overlaps and materiality through different texts, sound, light and circuits. For the Catalyst Grant project she intends to expand her research into circuits that can be used to build installation artworks and can also be applied as adaptive devices for children and adults with special/different abilities.
Rai
Rai is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Goa. Her inquiry largely moves around space, environs, language and fantasies - drawing from personal triggers, observing spaces as passages and engaging with negotiations in them. Her practice communicates through drawing, painting, text, photographs, books, comics, games and installations. Her work in the last few years revolves around river networks in the context of goa and their correlation with memory and amnesia. Rai completed her Bachelor’s degree in Art History from Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan and Master’s degree in Animation Filmmaking from National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.
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Savyasachi Anju Prabir
Savyasachi holds a B.Cr.A in Film and Contemporary Arts Practice from the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bengaluru and an MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Muenster, Germany. He is keen on using text, sound and image to create multimodal works and bring a reflexive and collaborative methodology to academic and artistic practice. In his current work, he has been experimenting with found images and objects, sound recordings and drawings. Drawing inspiration from the circadian rhythms of his environment, he wishes to arrive at new ways of artistic research and production.
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Drawing from the stories of guardian myths of Rakhondars, for the Catalyst Grant project, the trio proposes an interactive installation - How to befriend a Rakhondar, keeping in mind the current post colonial context of insider-outsider negotiations in Goa. Their process and the installation will explore and address aspects of permeability and preservation.
Sanayvi Naik
Sanayvi graduated from Goa College of Art and completed his Post-graduatiom in Sculpture from Faculty of fine Arts, MSU Baroda. His practice is satirical commentary on the socio, political events he comes across day-to-day. Working across several media such as metal, rubber, wood and fiberglass his work uses wit to explore and present human frailties like greed, ignorance, treachery and search of one’s own identity within. For the Catalyst Grant project Sanayvi will create an interactive sculptural installation that addresses the rapid political and environmental detritus in the state of Goa.
Urna Sinha
Urna is a printmaker with a bachelor's degree from Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati University and a master's degree in printmaking from Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara. Her current practice combines printmaking, fabric and bookmaking - layering objects, printed material, and books. She studies hands to explore the meaning of gestures and the politics of viewership. For the Catalyst Grant project she will develop an ongoing work on a book titled “Tracing Absence”. The ever growing book deals with the notion of collecting, which is endless and nonlinear. Multiple editions will be circulated across different people and venues, the content will ever be evolving and growing as the books change hands, gathering warmth and emotions.
Vinita Barretto
Vinita Barretto is a photographer who resides and works out of a secluded village in South Goa. Photography is a way of life for her. As a therapeutic form, she uses it to nurture herself and balance the turmoil within her, her family and the world outside. Inspired by everyday life, she finds solace in capturing the most mundane and delicate details around her. For the Goa Catalyst grant, Vinita proposes to build a narrative layering her personal work, with her reflections upon the rapidly transforming environmental mayhem that she lives in. Her approach is towards gaining deeper insights into her surroundings through research, investigation and community engagements .
CATALYST GRANT LENS BASED ART AWARDEE
In partnership with Nazar Foundation
Akshay Parvatkar
Born and brought up in Goa, Akshay is a graduate of the Film & Television Institute of India, Pune. Parvatkar’s work draws a lot from his personal life and the culture and history of Goa. For the Catalyst Grant, Akshay intends to make a Konkani short film about a story that is uniquely Goan, and yet universal in its message. The film will be an attempt to showcase the oft-unseen dynamics of caste politics in urban spaces. At first glance, it is a sports film, about a young boy wanting to play football. But the film slowly peels apart, layer by layer, the casteism, inequality and patriarchy that govern our world.
Support the initiative
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Goa Open Arts is a platform initiated by artists for artists to support and invigorate creative practice in Goa with the belief that creative thinking and discourse are vital for a healthy society. This initiative is supported and funded by people who acknowledge the role that art plays in community. You can support the initiative in your own way - from making a financial donation, contributing in kind or bringing on board your expertise.
To make a contribution or to read more about ways to support >
To get in touch drop us a mail at goaopenarts@gmail.com
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