The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, in collaboration with Serendipity Arts Foundation, invited applications from young artists for a five-week course, titled The Storytellers: A Course exploring Zines, Comics and Video.
Duration: September 10 – October 24, 2018
Educators and Modules:
Himanshu S | Z is for zines
Malik Sajad | Drawing Experience
Sameera Jain | Ways of Seeing
Course Facilitator: Lokesh Khodke
Participants: Akshay Sethi, Ankit Ravani, Pavithra Ramanujam, Maya Janine D’Costa, Sana Bansal, Yogesh Ramakrishna, Khandakar Ohida, Rahul Kamalasan, Rohit Kumar, Priyank Gothwal, Zeel Sanghvi, Tahsin Akhtar, Tilottama Bhowmick, and Vikrant Kano
The Storytellers course was co-organized by FICA and Serendipity Arts Foundation following the first collaboration, ‘The Moving Image: A Course Exploring Light, Movement and Narrative’ in 2017. Storytellers began on September 10, 2018 with an orientation session with Lokesh Khodke, Course Facilitator and Vidya Shivadas, Director of FICA.
The second edition of this course was directed at giving students an insight into how artists turn to the city as a studio, mining various resources, individuals and forming their own support structures. Each module was designed around the practice of the artist/filmmaker conducting the session, providing triggers for young practitioners to experiment. This intensive programme was directed towards the medium of graphic narrative and its various possibilities of creation. It intended to engage with art practices that have histories of working outside the confines of the art gallery or related sanctioned ‘white cube’ spaces, seeking more direct and immediate contact with their audiences. Of particular interest were the ways artists re-address and explore the richness of audio-visual and graphic story as a self-sustained practice. The emphasis through all the modules remained on exercises and explorations carried out by the participants.
To know more about the modules and the educators, click here.
The idea behind this course was not just to explore the technical skills devised by the respective mentors/artists, but also to create an immersive environment of learning and peer sharing, and engage with the larger conceptual questions these practices throw up. There were additional evening sessions with invited guest practitioners whose practices were deeply engaged with creating, researching and collecting various forms of storytelling. These included sessions with artist Bhagwati Prasad, comic author and editor Vidyun Sabhaney, filmmakers Ruchika Negi, Nundrisha Wakhloo, Gagandeep Singh, Prof. Narayani Gupta, a field-trip to Fardabad Mazdoor Samachar office and a session with founder-editor Sher Singh.
The Storytellers was therefore designed to explore multiple layers of visual storytelling and these mediums through three modules on video art, comics/graphic narrative and zines. Each module explored multiple possibilities of visual storytelling through fiction/non fiction, news as well as intimate stories from the participants’ own lives and observations. We sought applications from young artists who could devote uninterrupted time for participation in this course. Given the duration, we preferred people who are not presently enrolled in any undergraduate or postgraduate programmes.
The course culminated in an Open Studio organised on October 14, which provided a platform for the participants to share some of the processes and outcomes of the programme with everyone.
Open Day
After the three modules, the participants had ten days to think through and execute artworks they intended to present as part of an Open Day. Over the fortnight, they experimented with the mediums and formats discussed during the course, and engaged with the layout of the space to creatively display their exhibits. The exhibition opened as a body of work-in-progress, comprising zines, graphic narratives and video work, offering a range of intimate narratives harboured and expressed through different modes of storytelling.
The exhibition period also witnessed collateral events in the space to keep dialogues around the thematics addressed by the course active. We had puppeteer and puppet designer/director Anurupa Roy presented the history of the art of puppetry in India as well as her own body of work as developed through the Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust. Anurupa initiated an engaging conversation around questions of reality, unreality, anthropomorphizing the inanimate and the very material art of making the puppets by hand.
We also had comic artists, Shivangi Singh, Gaurav Sharma, Ishita Sharma and Rai come to our studio space and exchange notes with the participants of The Storytellers course. Each of them conducted short sessions with the participants about their own bodies of practice as they were developed during the Non-Fiction Comics Workshop with artist Orijit Sen in Kochi from July-August, 2018. This was followed by a short session with artist and co-founder of the Raqs Media Collective, Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Beginning with the concept of a ‘story’ and the many ways of ‘telling’ it, Shuddhabrata veered into anecdotes to delve deep into how storytelling as a mode and medium constitutes the essence of our histories.
For Serendipity Arts Foundation and FICA, the course was an invaluable experience in terms of building a curriculum from the inputs of practicing artists and providing the group of young practitioners a chance to explore ideas, techniques and mediums that they would have not had access to within the formal art college programmes. It was a very rich set of inputs for the group, supporting them in their journeys towards setting up their independent practices.
For more information about the modules, follow The Storytellers blog.