Here’s why a trip to Serendipity Arts Festival 2025 nudged us to take a closer look at our identity

Nostalgia. Identity. Homecoming. If we could sum up our experience of the latest edition of Serendipity Arts Festival in just three words, these would be the ones. The 10th edition of India’s largest multidisciplinary arts festival concluded in Goa in December, and we took a two-day trip to experience it in all its glory: from inspired visual art exhibits to riveting musical performances. We are here to tell you about our favourite picks from the festival to get you excited about the next edition already!

All you need to know about Serendipity Arts Festival 2025

Like every year, the festival was spread across several venues, and the first stop we made was at the Old GMC Complex. Pulsed with the energy of aesthetes of all ages, the venue primarily hosted visual art shows. As we scouted for the one to begin with, a distinct trrrrring drew us to a 1980s yellow payphone that turned out to be part of a three-part installation titled The Call. Created by Bengaluru-based artist Babu Eshwar Prasad, the installation also comprised a custom-built Mutoscope. The best part of it was however a film where a man, in his dreams, roams around a megalithic landscape in Karnataka, only to bump into a yellow payphone ringing in the middle of nowhere. Is the phone then, like all other modern technology, just a portal to some other dimension of time and space? The Call left us with a lingering question. 

“I once had a vague dream that I was roaming around in a monolithic landscape… 20 years later, while writing a dream sequence for a feature film, this visual came back to me and ultimately inspired me to make this movie,” Mr Prasad told Indulge.

The next stop that left a lasting impression on our minds was National Award-winning filmmaker Divya Cowasji’s There Are No Love Letters Here — a project documenting and re-imagining her family history through material objects and family lores passed on through generations. Shortly after Divya’s grandfather passed away, her grandmother burnt away all the love letters she had ever received from her husband, much to the grief of the artist. This rebellious act of refusing anyone else to enter their private haven is what inspired the title of the exhibit — and Divya’s effusive archival and showcase of the 200-year history of the Cowasji clan. Not just old letters and photographs, even handwritten notes of family recipes and Divya’s recreation of images of family members come together to form the exhibit.

We paused next at a series of photographs, each of which were a front profile of a migrant worker, holding a slate with their name written on it. Titled Naming Those Consigned to Namelessness, Samar Jodha’s installation restored individuality to Global South migrant workers reduced to cogs in production. The work not only dismantled stereotypes about migrants, but also invited empathy for their personal struggles and sacrifices.

In an attempt to break away from the confines of GMC, we now moved to an open-air venue — Promenade. It’s here where we stumbled upon an exhibition featuring works of five photographers: Anurag Banerjee, Assavri Kulkarni, Avani Rai, Indrajit Khambe and Zahra Amiruddin. The exhibition — Feeling Home. Where is home? — defined ‘home’ not as a physical location, but as an emotional state of either intimate belonging or profound longing. Curator Dinesh Khanna’s inquiry bridged the gap between personal memories of inaccessible ancestral cities and his recent experience of his daughters’ moving out of their childhood homes. Our favourites were Avani Rai’s photographs, such as the one with a large group gathered in white attire beneath a sprawling tree, capturing the essence of shared identity and rootedness.

We ended the day with Vaarso — a musical performance by Priya Saraiya and duo Sourendro and Soumyojit — at Nagalli Hills. Curated by Shubha Mudgal and Aneesh Pradhan, the performance explored love through the songs and poetry of Gujarat and Bengal. While Priya’s riveting performance got the Gujaratis in the audience to sing-along, Soumyojit’s performance won the audience over slowly but steadily. While early on the performance, he built up the audience’s interest by singing Bengali songs that have popular Hindi versions, he later left them thoughtful and intrigued by his charming renditions of songs from Rabindranath Tagore’s Bhanusingher Padabali. Did you know that the popular Rabindrasangeet Hridoy Amar Nachere Ajike inspired the Gujarati folk Morbani Thane Gathkare? The performance left the audience with more such interesting tidbits about this lesser-known bridge between the country’s East and West.

Shubha Mudgal, on the other hand, opened up to Indulge about her awe for Priya Saraiya’s role in the performance, “Usually, we get to hear that there are not enough women in popular music. Here, we have this younger composer-lyricist Priya Saraiya. She has, on her own, done something extremely unusual — she has put together this piece featuring so many stunning voices from Gujarat. I think she is a person we can bank on to completely destroy this myth about women in contemporary popular music.”

We began the next day with a visit to a new venue, the Directorate of Accounts. As we reached the first floor of the heritage building, a glistening bed made of thousands of stones — reminiscent of a river — grabbed our attention. The installation turned out to be Is the water chavdar? by artist Rajyashri Goody: a monumental tribute to the 1927 Mahad Satyagraha. For the unversed, the Mahad Satyagraha, led by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, was a landmark non-violent movement where thousands of Dalits asserted their fundamental right to access public water at the Chavdar Tank, challenging centuries of caste-based exclusion. Is the water chavdar? featured 10,000 small ceramic stupas resembling stones, representing the people who joined the movement to reclaim their right to water. As we took a round about the installation, we also came across images of people standing close to Chavdar Tank in the modern day. Several books with poetry about Dalit history and even recipes popular in the community were kept for the viewers to peruse through, giving them the chance of a more personal, intimate look at the movement.

Right about then, we heard what seemed like a background narration in Bangla! In a quest to find the source of the familiar intonations, we entered the next room to find the screening of Shabnam (Night Dew) by Bangladeshi artiste Reetu Sattar. The documentary traced the journey of muslin from its origin as a 17th-century luxury to its transformation into a colonial commodity. What made the film unforgettable was how, by the end, it had become more about Reetu’s personal journey of realising how colonialism has shaped her social identity. Along with it was the installation Warp and Last drops of the weavers’ bodies, using materials like fractured looms, muslin yarn and sewing needles to symbolise the debilitating exhaustion and systemic violence inflicted upon weavers’ bodies.

We also loved The Mini Narkasur Archive. Curated by Diptej Vernekar, the series reimagined the towering mythical destroyer Narkasur as an intimate and handheld effigy. 

Post lunch, we decided to participate more actively and dabble in creating art for a couple of hours. Thanks to the seamless shuttle services, we soon found ourselves at ⁠Create Your Own Petrykivka-Inspired Mandala in the Old GMC building, a workshop aimed to teach its participants to paint vibrant mandalas using the floral grace and brush techniques of Ukrainian folk art petrykivka. By the end, however, this writer miserably failed to replicate the brilliance that her co-participants achieved. And with the humble realisation that her relationship with art must be restricted to only writing about it for the greater good, she headed to her final session of the day — the legendary River Raag.

For the unversed, River Raag is a signature musical performance of the festival, offering an immersive experience of Indian classical music. It features a 60-minute performance held on a unique sunset cruise along the Mandovi River every day of the festival, departing from the Santa Monica Jetty.

The evening we attended, the performance was a jugalbandi between Kolkata-based musicians Kalyanjeet Das on sitar and Pranav Dutt on percussion, and curated by Bickram Ghosh. As the cruise began sailing, the coastal breeze swept across our faces while our eyes followed the setting sun. The artistes set the tone of the evening with a yearningly soulful piece in patdeep, traversed across other raags building momentum, finishing with a flirtatiously delightful bageshri. By the time we came out of the trance that the performance had induced, we had already bookmarked River Raag on our itinerary of our visit to the festival’s next edition!

X: @MallikPrattusa

Email: prattusa@newindianexpress.com

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