We have curated several festivals, in collaboration with other organizations and venues in the city.
Equal
In 2019, we curated ‘Equal’ Rangashankara’s bi-annual festival. The festival was a call to remember and experience different forms of resilience through a feminine lens that is interdependent, fluid, dynamic, attentive and expressive. An acknowledgment of the feminine, is not simply to categorise oppression, but to confront the patriarch that exists within us. The festival looks at the masculine and feminine, operational in different degrees, across history and memory through panel discussions, a visual exhibition, and performances.
‘Nirankusha: Fearless Speak’
November, 2014
‘Fearless Speak’ foregrounded instances and attempts of negotiation, slippage and elusion, within the works of independent artists and media practitioners. The festival emerged as a collective response to the rising threat to the freedom of speech and expression in the country. The intent of the festival is to create a space for fearless speech and listening through collaborations with artists, activists and academics whose work raises questions around censorship, sedition, free speech and expression, identity and discrimination.
The festival was organized in collaboration with the Alternative Law Forum.
Featured works
Sudalaiamma (Gravedigger) by Marappachi features a female graveyard worker who is determined to grant a decent burial to an ‘encountered’ young man’s body of a much loved political activist.
Koogaimaravaacigal (The Dwellers of Hunger Caves) by Manal Magudi Theatre Land uses myth and legends to raise fundamental questions around violence, custodial rapes, displacement, evictions, torture faced particularly by dalit and tribal communities.
Colours of Trans by Panmai Theatre uses cabaret scenes, monologues, stories and dances about the illicit bodies and unwritten life stories of transmen and transwomen.
Walk by Maya Rao is a response to the Delhi 2012 gang rape incident; a monologue directed at the notion of safe and unsafe public spaces.
Kabir Kala Manch sing songs of dissent to convey alternate versions of truth that are otherwise censored from mainstream media around the politics of caste, communalism and patriarchy.
Conversation with Tenzin Tsundue & Abhishek Majumdar on Tibet moderated by Lawrence Liang to provoke a dialogue on the role of poetry and prose as a lie detector of our times.
Emergency Control Room an audio installation produced by maraa focusing on the disturbances and distortions on censorship, discrimination and resistance in the media sector.
Museum of Interruptions, an visual exhibition on censorship curated by the Alternative Law Forum.
Illicit Bodies, a series of intimate encounters with law, of lawyers with trouble, of art makers with legality through performance curated by Suresh Kumar.