Kolkata Centre for Creativity also aims for accessibility at IAF 2023
Kolkata Centre for Creativity (KCC), the multi-disciplinary interactive centre for art and creativity will be present at the India Art Fair 2023 as the festival’s inclusivity partner at the Auditorium, NSIC Exhibition Grounds, New Delhi. Through its vertical KCC DEAI (Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusivity), they focus on the application of art for the development of marginalised and differently-abled persons, empowering them through self-expression and creativity. KCC continuously works with national and international experts in art and accessibility to build the framework for these engagements vis-à-vis art.
KCC believes ability depends significantly on the accessibility to resources, and they work towards making them available, keeping in mind the diversity and differential needs of their audiences. Through a series of programs, presentations, exhibitions, performances, sensitization seminars, workshops and recruitment, KCC is consistently striving to ensure that it is an all-inclusive LGBTQI+-friendly art space.
Learn Togetherness II
Theme: Being Queer, Being Home
In the second year of celebrating the LGBTQIA++ Pride Month in June 2022, KCC organized the second edition of ‘Learn Togetherness’ in collaboration with Sappho for Equality. The centre invited visual and performing art creations based on the idea of “home” explored through the queer lens for the exhibition themed “Being Queer, Being Home”. Paintings, photographs, sculptures, installations, writings, and performance pieces that explore “home” in relation to being queer—from the perspective of a queer person in a conventional home to the utopic exploration of how a queer home might be—were all welcome. A selection of works of art was showcased.
Inclusion at KCC also translates into taking one and all into the ambit of the art world irrespective of their background, socio-economic status, practice and so on. Such an inclusive amalgamation can be observed at its finest through KCC’s annual AMI Arts Festival.
AMI Arts Festival is KCC’s annual free-for-all cultural festival that takes pride in its Indian cultural legacy and celebrates contemporary manifestations in the arts. Though locally rooted, being trans-local in spirit, the festival hosts participants from across India and abroad to encourage the cross-pollination of ideas and creativity. The AMI Arts Festival becomes an all-inclusive melting pot of all kinds of arts, artists and programs, including multiple exhibitions, a delightful bazaar, musical concerts, folk performances, workshops, and virtual talk sessions. The 3rd edition of the festival brought on one platform maestros like Pt. Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, renowned musicians and singers like Anjan Dutt and Iman Chakraborty, curators like Suresh Jayaram, and emerging artists from both visual and performing arts backgrounds among others.
In 2022, some of the programs that best exemplified KCC’s efforts in the field of inclusivity include:
The Afterlife of Performance ft. Nikhil Chopra
KCC invited viewers to flow through, like water in a landscape, charting new courses in time, responding to and changing the environment as they move along. ‘The Afterlife of Performance featuring Nikhil Chopra’ attempted to understand durational-performance by looking at the recordings of some of Nikhil’s celebrated works along with exhaustive and explanatory notes that provided insights into the artist and his practice.
This exhibition also doubled up as an open invitation to others to react and respond, which is an essential feature of Nikhil’s practice. The ‘afterlife’ of Nikhil’s performance, or his absence from KCC’s exhibition space, created an opportunity for others to respond to them in a manner that has never been attempted before. He lingered on in the exhibition space, even in absence, as light and sound, as words on the wall, and intertwined in a string of questions and answers that revealed his practice to the layman as much as to fellow travellers, both in and beyond the art world.
AMI Arts Anthem
As a musical prelude to AMI Arts Festival, Kolkata Centre for Creativity launched the AMI Anthem on 5th December. The widely popular music video reached 10k views within a span of 24 hours! Directed by National Award-winning actor Ridhhi Sen and composed by Subhadeep Guha, the anthem features well-known Bengali actor Anirban Bhattacharya who is also the lyricist of the anthem.
The AMI Anthem celebrates the innate inclusivity of Bengal’s diverse cultural heritage in the daily lives of people from every section of society, keeping the spirit of AMI intact. To highlight that, the video has been created from the perspective of four underprivileged kids who manage to transform their regular mundane living into a celebration of life through art.
Slopes to Sea
West Bengal is full of rich and diverse traditions. There is an abundance of folk art forms. While some of them are popular in their own regions, others have become so popular that they have been scaling national and international boundaries for a long time. Each and every folk form has got its own characteristics, own dialect, own aesthetics and different structural formations.
These diverse folk performances were brought together by Music Composer, Singer, and Songwriter Subhadeep Guha in one ensemble performance at the inauguration of AMI Arts Festival 2022. As the name ‘Slopes to Sea’ suggests, the performance began with the folk forms from the hills of Bengal and gradually came down to the Bay of Bengal, highlighting the more prominent/representative folk forms of the different districts. So in effect, the performance was a cultural mapping of Bengal showcasing a selection of 12 folk forms — Music of the Hills (chantings of monasteries), Bhawaiya Songs (North Bengal), Cha Bagicha Jhumur (Tea Garden songs also from North Bengal), Gambhira (Malda), Baul (Birbhum), Tushu-Bhadu (Medinipur), Pater gaan, Jhumur (Bankura) with Santali Jhumur, Kirtan (Nadia) with Hobbol Danka (North 24 Parganas), Sari Gaan (South Bengal), Bhatiyali (South Bengal) and Chhau (Purulia).
Tactile Artworks and Braille Book
Accessibility and inclusivity being KCC’s primary objectives, this year too the Centre shall present tactile artworks at IAF and launch the next book in the series of KCC Braille Books on Art. KCC’s focus for this year is the art of S.G. Vasudev. The book will be designed and published in collaboration with Blind Persons’ Association. KCC aims to make the arts accessible to all and it is in this vein that it continues to take tactile artworks and Braille books to IAF each year with focus on one legendary Indian artist each time.