In 2015, the Serendipity Arts Festival was envisaged as a project that would bring the arts out of rigid compartments. According to Smriti Rajgarhia, director, Serendipity Arts Foundation and Festival, the decision to create these conversations between art forms wasn’t arbitrary but about restoring something fundamental. “When you place visual arts alongside performance, culinary practice sits next to craft, sound installation encounters dance, unexpected resonances emerge. Our curatorial model actively encourages collision,” she explains. This year, for the tenth edition, the team has expanded its scope by bringing in 35 curators, who are presenting 250 multidisciplinary projects across eight art forms—visual arts, music, dance, theatre, culinary arts, craft, photography and new media. “But these are not parallel tracks; they are in constant dialogue,” adds Rajgarhia. Here are ten reasons to visit the festival taking place across Panjim till 21 December:
Points of collision
The dialogue between the various art forms manifests itself in projects such as Multiplay 02: Soft Systems by Thukral and Tagra, which lies at the intersection of visual arts, interactive installation and social intervention. Then there is Ranjit Barot and Roysten Abel’s Beat Route, with percussion from Kerala's Mizhavu and Chenda alongside instruments from Rajasthan and visuals by Kabir Singh Chowdhry. “It's not fusion for fusion's sake, but is revelatory of the common language of rhythm that connects India's diverse musical geographies,” says Rajgarhia.
Rooted in Goa
The city of Panjim has always served as a backdrop to the programming, and the projects respond to the heritage and sociocultural landscape of the city. The Old GMC Complex, which is a colonial-era medical college established in 1842, becomes the venue for photo exhibitions like There are No Love Letters Here curated by Prashant Panjiar and Tanvi Mishra, theatre performances such as Nihsango Ishwar, and culinary demonstrations at the Food Lab. “When audiences move through these buildings, they're not choosing ‘the art section’ or ‘the theatre wing’, rather they're experiencing culture as an integrated phenomenon,” she adds.
New commissions
Nearly 40% of the festival projects are new commissions. Razai, for instance, is a multidisciplinary performance that fuses AI-generated music, projection-mapped visuals and contemporary dance. It is a result of a collaboration between artists from India, Italy and Japan. Similarly, Duty Free curated by Ranjana Dave transforms a riverfront verandah in the Old GMC building into a space where three dance artists take turns, making it both studio and stage. “It functions as an exhibition space and embodied archive, with performances and workshops at scheduled intervals,” elaborates Rajgarhia.
Access for all
This has been a testing ground for the SAF team. This year too accessibility curator Salil Chaturvedi has brought this front and centre with an exhibition, Therefore I Am, featuring seven artists whose lived truths of disability shape their creative practices. Silent Rhythms has a group of deaf performers demonstrating Indian Sign Language (ISL) Poems and Visual Vernacular (VV) in an ISL Jam. “We've created a Sensory Room at the GMC Building offering multi-sensory experiences to support unique sensory needs, and our programming includes audio-described film screenings through Cinema for Every Sense, making Hindi cinema accessible to blind and low-vision audiences,” adds Rajgarhia.
Where food meets drama
Since the inception of the festival, the culinary arts programming has explored storytelling around pertinent topics such as memory, displacement, climate activism, and more, using diverse media. This year, Chef Thomas Zacharias and The Locavore have collaborated with theatre director Quasar Thakore-Padamsee to create What Does Loss Taste Like. This steers clear from the regular demonstrations or tastings that one has to come associate with food programming at festivals. Rather, the presentation looks at speculative theatre in the culinary arts around climate activism. This required Zacharias to think of dramaturgy and Thakore-Padamsee to understand gastropolitics. Set in the year 2100, the spatial presentation asks audiences to literally taste biodiversity loss, climate collapse and cultural amnesia.
Similarly at Casa San Antonio in Fontainhas, Chef Manu Chandra has collaborated with writer Shubhra Chatterji and director Divya Rani to create an immersive theatrical dining experience in Goa is a Bebinca, with each course revealing stories of migration, traditions and communal identity. The project transforms a 100-year-old heritage home into a living taverna, with the story following the central protagonist Mary, who wants to popularise the space in the face of opposition by her father. “Food becomes dramaturgy, the dining table the stage and taste the narrative device,” shares Rajgarhia.
This crosspollination of disciplines and ideas can also be seen in Chef Dalarympei Sabrina Kharmawphlang’s workshop, which will respond to the smell notes left by the audience in the Smell Trace exhibition. It will feature a tasting menu, which reinterprets food objects that people can’t identify by smell alone. “Culinary arts become a form of sensory archaeology, responding to visitor interactions with visual installations,” she adds. In the same vein, Prahlad Sukhtankar's Salt exhibition brings together stories of salts from across India—the lands they originate from, the lives and cultures of people who craft them; and workshops like Embracing Your Future Fish explore how changing ecosystems affect our food systems and diets.
Engaging with histories in the visual arts
Curator Sahil Naik's Not a Shore, Neither a Ship, But the Sea Itself brings together artists from Goa, the Goan diaspora, and those engaging with oceanic histories. “They argue for Goa-ness as an atmosphere and sensation rather than a fixed geography,” explains Rajgarhia. “This curatorial framework influences programming across venues. The maritime theme resonates with our Barge interventions at Captain of Ports Jetty in Old Goa, where curator Veeranganakumari Solanki is creating site-specific sonic and visual works responding to the river, the offshore casinos, and the liminal space between land and water.”
According to the SAF team members, the process of putting this together involved monthly curatorial convenings throughout the year, wherein ideas migrated across segments. So, ideas of migration and identity evident in Displacement, curated by Rahaab Allana, also sparked ideas within theatre curator Anuradha Kapur, who is presenting The Legends of Khasak, a performance about a young man arriving in a remote Kerala village. “Both explore displacement and belonging, but through entirely different media. This thematic resonance wasn't planned top-down; it emerged from curators listening to each other,” says Rajgarhia.
A new incubator for culture
This year’s edition sees the launch of The BRIJ incubator, a new platform supporting early cultural and craft-led enterprises. The idea is to test infrastructure that can connect artistic talent with sustainable livelihoods. The launch is accompanied by a panel on ‘Business Model Innovation and Funding Landscape in Arts and Crafts, featuring Priya Krishnamorthy of 200 Million Artisans, and more. The inaugural set of incubatees are also conducting workshops at the Art Park. These include Ektara, which focuses on sustainable gifting, Golden Feathers that converts chicken waste into organic textiles and Karghewala about full-stack handwoven textile solutions.
Immersive experiences around heritage
According to Rajgarhia, the festival explores new ways of engaging with heritage. Beasts of Reincarnations: Mythical beings in the city by Diptej Vernekar features large-scale installations across Panjim's heritage streets and waterways, reimagining Goa's living traditions of effigy-making—where demons, deities, and imagined creatures are born and reborn each year through community rituals. Meanwhile, Goa's Smallest Big Tradition: The Mini Narkasur Archive celebrates how the tradition of miniature Narkasur-making has liberated itself from rigid ritual timelines, sometimes lasting up to 15 days beyond Diwali.
Culture and gaming come together in The Games People Play curated by WEFT Foundation, which invites visitors into an immersive, participatory archive of ancient Indian board games—chaupar, nav-kakdi, and wagh bakri—reimagined through contemporary craft and scenography. “Far from passive observers, visitors become active players, engaging with the interplay of mythology, mathematics, and modern craft,” says Rajgarhia.
The dance programming too offers a multisensorial journey. Jayachandran Palazhy’s curation, Razai, is a collaboration between the dancers, scenographer and technical director Gaurav Singh Nijjer, interactive movement systems by Kunihiko Matsuo, AI music composition by Andrea Marinelli and more. In the performance, architecture, technology, and human presence become a single sensorial journey.
Projects backed by research
Like in the past several years, the tenth edition will also feature work by the recipients of the various grants instituted by the Serendipity Arts Foundation. The Directorate of Accounts, for instance, is serving as a backdrop to works by five grantees—Karthik Subramanian, Pinak Banik, Ishita Jain, Aman Alam and Chinky Shukla— of the Serendipity x Arles Grant, dedicated to lens-based practitioners from South Asia. Aditya Pande, who took part in a residency in collaboration with the Royal College of Art, London, is presenting Disconnected, a collection of electrostatic photograms derived from found and discarded data cables. “These works appear as physical and metaphorical remains of vestigial connections in our interconnected world, essaying analogous realities of severed links in the apparatuses of power,” explains Rajgarhia.
Then there is FunkyBodhi, featuring S. Rani’s Irular Ensemble, which has emerged from the Folk Arts Grant. Rani is a folk singer and community leader from the Irular community, traditionally snake and rat catchers, whose livelihoods have been impacted over the years. This year, the Independent Music Production Grant has supported Jatayu and Chirag Todi, who are performing at the festival. The former is a Chennai-based rock band, which brings together Carnatic music with jazz and rock. Todi is a Mumbai-based songwriter, whose oeuvre spans pop and jazz.
Some rather interesting projects have emerged from the Food Matters Grant, which supports creation of knowledge networks around food practices in South Asia. So, you have Rediscovering Lost Fish Recipes by Biswajit Das and Chandan Borgohain, which traces indigenous fish recipes as artistic inquiry, engaging with fading culinary traditions of a community along the dying Kulsi River in Assam. “The work navigates entanglements of taste, memory, and loss amid shifting contours of climate change and extractive interventions, positioning food as both medium and metaphor to reflect on local food systems and ecological futures,” explains Rajgarhia. Also pertinent is Culinary Cosmopolitanism through Porotta Shops of Rural and Coastal Tamil Nadu by Sumaiya Ahamed Mustafa, which explores the cultural, economic, and social significance of Porotta eateries across Tamil Nadu through exhibition and presentation.
Of serendipitous encounters
The Puppet Folk Arts Lab demonstrates how institutional encounters can spark transformation. According to Rajgarhia, the foundation has supported traditional puppeteers for years, but they largely worked in isolation. In 2024, some of them were invited for an extended residency with contemporary puppeteer Anurupa Roy and international facilitators. “The encounter was challenging since traditional masters were uncertain about ‘modern’ approaches, and contemporary artists unsure how to engage with rigorous traditional forms without appropriating,” she shares. But over weeks of shared meals, watching each other work, something shifted. Puppeteers from different states started collaborating on hybrid forms. A Rajasthani string puppeteer incorporated shadow techniques from Odisha, and glove puppeteer from Tamil Nadu experimented with Bengali scroll storytelling structures. “The breakthrough came when they realised they were all facing similar challenges—how to make ancient forms speak to contemporary issues, how to sustain traditional techniques while addressing current social realities,” adds Rajgarhia. “The works that are being featured at this year's festival are neither purely traditional nor simply contemporary, they're genuinely new forms born from unexpected dialogue.” One of the performances addresses climate change through mythological narratives while another explores caste and identity through mixed puppet forms.
The Barge project at Captain of Ports Jetty also demonstrates how the space itself can spark serendipitous creation. “Curator Veeranganakumari Solanki had been planning sonic interventions, but when she visited the actual barge—an industrial vessel repurposed as performance space, floating on the Mandovi river with offshore casinos visible across the water—the site transformed her curatorial vision,” elaborates Rajgarhia. In the exhibition, Farah Mulla creates a performance using strobe lighting and periods of darkness, asking audiences to experience it with eyes closed. Abhinay Khoparzi is performing live-coded electronic music, his algorithms responding in real-time to the river's movements, the casino lights, the ambient sounds of boats and birds.
“One of the most powerful encounters will come to life when Danish saxophonist Lars Møller, who'd been studying with Ashwani Shankar's family for decades, will perform with Shankar and tabla player Zuheb Ahmed Khan. The boat's movement will introduce subtle rhythmic variations—musicians have to listen even more intensely to stay synchronized. The sunset's changing light will alter the performance's emotional register,” she adds. Passengers from other boats would be able to hear fragments of the performance across water, creating an unintended audience.