In 2100, food will come in cubes, without memory and aroma, growing from algorithm, depleted of all nutrients. “One seed, one outcome!” chef Thomas Zacharias told participants at What Does Loss Taste Like?, an interdisciplinary performance curated by theatre-maker Quasar Thakore-Padamsee and Zacharias’s sustainable food platform, The Locavore, at the 2025 Serendipity Arts Festival (SAF), Panjim. Hosted at the Directorate of Accounts Building in Goa’s capital, the immersive experience brought together food and theatre in a deeply researched commentary on the dystopic ecological futures awaiting humankind. It was also metonymic of the spectacular turn within Indian art festivals and biennales, balanced on the knife’s edge between performativity and the polycrisis roiling our world.
Like previous years, this tenth iteration of the SAF, held from December 12 to 21, was multidisciplinary, with a diverse selection of visual arts, crafts, photography, dance, theatre, music and culinary arts, besides workshops, panel discussions, guided walks, etc. To mark its first decade, the festival invited a number of curators who had been associated with its previous editions, taking their number to more than 40, possibly the highest for any such event in the world. More than 250 events and exhibitions were spread across 20 venues in Panjim and a few nearby places, such as Old Goa. On the same day as the SAF’s inauguration, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale’s (KMB’s) sixth edition opened in Kochi, about 800 km south of Panjim. While the KMB had only one curator -- the visual and performance artist Nikhil Chopra -- its events and exhibitions were also spread across 20 locations in the city. Besides contemporary arts, the KMB’s programming also included performances, film screenings, workshops and music.
Both the SAF and KMB point to how leading art and culture festivals in the country have grown in scale and variety over the past decade. This is in keeping with global trends in this field, cheekily summarized by The Guardian’s art critic Adrian Searle as “everything, everywhere, all at once,” in his description of the 2024 Venice Biennale. Walking around the venues of the SAF -- including a sizeable barge anchored in the Mandovi river, repurposed Portuguese-era buildings, city parks and promenades -- I found it impossible, at times, to not be overwhelmed by the continuous encounters with works demanding active engagement through multisensory stimulation. The spectacularizing of art festivals, I realized, was most effectively expressed through this nearly all-pervasive performativity.
The Performative Turn
This performative turn was approved by the Mumbai-based Quasar Thakore-Padamsee, who has been a theatre curator at the SAF for four years, including this one. He said, “Most exhibits seem to be incorporating live components, and I consider it a win.” He also specified that these elements need not be only related to “human performance.” He acknowledged that while static works could inspire meditative reflections, a lot of it “seems to be destined only for Instagram now.”
Visual arts curator Veerangana Solanki also used performativity in many of the projects she curated for her exhibition titled Barge. The space she chose was itself quite dramatic: a 450-foot barge (Neil PNJ 143) docked on the bank of the Mandovi in Old Goa. The curatorial note stated: “Drawing from three exhibitions that were part of previous editions of the Serendipity Arts Festival -- Future Landing, Synaesthetic Notations, and A Haptic Score -- Barge too foregrounds the audience to activate and engage in a participatory experience that allows each view to become a memorable imprint.”
Boarding the vessel at the Captain of Ports Jetty, climbing into its hollowed-out cargo tank, and feeling the rhythm of the river tide were definitely aesthetic stimulants. The experience prompted one of my travel companions, a theatre director, to comment on how such a space could be successfully used to stage The Tempest or The Merchant of Venice. The four main projects Solanki curated were aural presentations by Hemant Sreekumar and Dennis Fabian Peter (Non-Linear), Julian Segard’s charcoal paintings, and Prajakta Potnis’s site-specific light and sculptural installation, An Elegy for Light. Solanki also reflected on the performative turn in festivals, mentioning: “While it might be true that the audience comes in for the more performative works, a quieter work, too, has its value.” She gave the example of Pandit Pran Nath’s installation as part of her curation, Synaesthetic Notations, for the 2023 SAF.
Thukral and Tagra, one of the curators for visual arts at the SAF, also incorporated performativity and play in their exhibition, Multiplay 2. In their curatorial note, they wrote: “play becomes a tool to expand meaning, connect deeper, and learn together.” Entering the old Directorate of Accounts Building in central Panjim, viewers were invited “to slow down, walk, linger and witness the choreography of light across the cloth” as they climbed the stairs under the tightly strung white textiles that comprised German artist Alke Reeh’s Radiance. Turning left, one entered Breathe, an installation by Mumbai-based Teja Gavanker, which formed a breathing pattern as participants operated it. Bengaluru-based artist and printmaker Jayasimha Chandrashekar’s Every Day is a Cliché was a print performance, as part of which he printed hundreds of newspapers that visitors could take away with them. Chunky Move from Melbourne used an undulating inflatable in which dancers Sanakshi Sidhu and Enzo Nazario performed an intimate duet. Commenting on their curated pieces, Thukral and Tagra wrote: “They hold space rather than occupy it, they invite rather than instruct…. They reveal that participation is not merely an activity; it is a relationship.”
The performative turn in festivals such as the SAF can be understood as a consequence of spectacularization. Drawing upon Karl Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism, Guy Debord argued in The Society of the Spectacle (1967) that capitalist societies replace lived experiences with representation, as social relations increasingly operate through images. Festivals, however, have traditionally been understood as communal experiences. Emile Durkheim described them as moments of “collective effervescence” -- a “time out of time” to quote Alessandro Falassi -- as opposed to everyday economic life. Yet, as biennales and festivals proliferate, cultural production patterns may grow repetitive, with an overall façade of excess that perhaps dilutes the charge and impact of individual works. Further, increasing incorporation of performativity in works of visual art, in an attempt to adhere to the festival atmosphere, also runs the risk of silencing quieter and more reflective presentations. Having said that, these events and exhibitions still have the potential to stand out or break free of the clutter. As noted by Jennie Jordan, this can be achieved by creating immersive, performative works that respond to specific locational and cultural contexts and political urgency, an approach evident at the SAF.
Troubled Times
The idea that festival time is special and opposed to our regular lives continues to be popular even now. Byung Chul-Han writes in Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity (2023): “Festivals are free from the needs of mere life.” However, this clear separation seems to have broken down in this era, as the socio-political, economic and ecological crises (described as polycrisis) of non-festive time keeps invading festive time. This is also evident in festivals like the SAF, in terms of the many works featured which directly refer to real-world politics (in previous years, some of these have also been at the centre of controversy and protest).
In this latest edition, for instance, Prajakta Potnis presented her installation An Elegy for Light, inspired by historian Ian Kumekawa’s Empty Vessel: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge (2025), which “characterizes the barge as a stark emblem of global capitalism -- an object that drifts to wherever labour is cheapest, taxation minimal and regulatory oversight weakest.” Viewing it after nightfall is almost like stepping into a post-apocalyptic narrative, and it may well point to the other cruises parked along the Mandovi which attract tourists with casinos and entertainment shows.
Two photography exhibitions housed at the Old PWD building in Panjim -- Murmurations, curated by Ravi Agarwal, and Displacement, curated by Rahaab Allana -- responded to migrations caused by major political, economic or ecological disruption. Murmurations opened with Zishaan A. Latif’s The Edge: Remnants, a collection of photographs of the Miyah community in Assam, Bengali-speaking Muslims who have been persecuted in recent years. Accompanied by a sound piece and performance by Shams Qabid (on December 14) and drawings by Soumya Yadav, it marked the communally fraught and hateful times we live in. Similarly, Allana’s curation brought together artists from Lebanon, Iraq, Qatar, Afghanistan and Morocco, displaced by conflict, who “demand that lives threatened by political whims, invent new modes of existence, and carve out spaces of defiance in the wreckage” (from the curatorial note). Anyone entering the exhibitions also had to go past two photographs of 19th-century Palestine that draped the facade of the building, a stark reminder of a land that continues to devastated by war.
Palestine also inspired, in some ways, poet and curator Ranjit Hoskote’s exhibition Otherland, featuring photographs by Naveen Kishore, Ram Rahman, Samar Jodha and Ritesh Uttamchandani. Despite their diverse practices, different geographies and aesthetic concerns, all four photographers responded to the idea of belonging and estrangement. Hoskote wrote in the curatorial note: “The title registers a play on the trope of motherland … in nationalist rhetoric, the true and proper site of belonging and self-definition.” In a panel discussion with the photographers at the SAF’s Old GMC venue on December 15, Hoskote revealed that he was triggered to curate this exhibition after being accused of anti-Semitism, leading to his resignation from the Finding Committee of Documenta 2021. This was a fallout of signing a petition against a 2019 event, organized by the Consulate General of Israel in Mumbai, on “Zionism and Hindutva.”
The growing centrality of performance in Indian art festivals, such as the SAF, is more than curatorial fashion or audience-engagement strategies. Amidst the polycrisis, performance offers a language of immediacy and shared vulnerability. It collapses the distance between the artwork and the viewer. Festival spaces, once imagined as “time out of time,” now absorb the urgencies of the present, becoming sites of collective reckoning. The potential is ensconced in the possibility to make the crisis felt, rather than merely represented.
Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent journalist, writer and doctoral student at Birmingham City University. His PhD focuses on Indian art and culture festivals, specifically the Serendipity Arts Festival in Panjim and Birmingham.