Feb 6, 20203 min read

Goa Open Arts Festival 2020

The Goa Open Arts festival is a new artist-driven event conceptualised to promote the creative community based in Goa & provide a space for new conversations and initiatives to take shape.

Free & open to the public, the Goa Open Arts festival will be held in Nagoa, North Goa from 13th to 16th February 2020, and seeks to be an all-inclusive platform and welcomes participation from first-time artists and makers from across the creative arts.

Text / Textile Assemblages by Rajeshree Thakker & Salil Chaturvedi

Busting at the seams with artists, musicians, photographers, designers, writers, chefs, etc, Goa has an incredible pool of resident creative talent. A community of people who are both native to Goa, as well as those from other parts of India and around the world who have chosen to make Goa their home.

The vision of this new initiative is to invigorate & connect this Goa-based created community, with the belief that cross-pollination of ideas will catalyse new creativity, and that a creatively engaged population benefits society at large.

The festival will provide a platform for artistic expression and experimentation to established as well as upcoming arts practitioners. With a focus on community building, local impact and bringing awareness to social issues, the inaugural Goa Open Arts festival will host a parallel program of activities which highlight issues of sustainability and environmental impact. These subjects will be addressed through specially commissioned artworks, programs with children from the local community, performances, music and more.

A full programme schedule can be found here.

Registration for workshops can also be found on the festival website.

Hawa, Sufi Music Performance & ‘Watergram’ print on paper by Meesha Holley

The festival committee received over 150 applications of which approximately 50 participants of various disciplines were chosen.

Artists selected for the program include eminent Goan artist Walter D'Souza, performer Nikhil Chopra, visual artist Nandita Kumar, artist Kausalya Gadekar, printmaker Viraj Naik, photographer Bharat Sikka, chef Anumitra Ghosh Dastidar (Edible Archives), the Travelling Library Project, Alakananda Nag, Orijit Sen, Sonia Shirsat, The Coffee Cats, Tritha Sinha, Ramdas Gadekar, Adrien Roche, Ayesha Seth, Bharath Ramamrutham, and many emerging talents from Goa including Shilpa Mayenkar, Rujuta Rao, Mustafa Khanbhai, Dheer Kaku, Alvaro Pinto Furtado, Bhisaji Gadekar, Pakhi Sen, Rajendra Mardolkar, Okedo & King Prawns, Nishant Saldanha and others.

A full list of participants can be found here

Okedo & King Prawns, Impana Kulkarni by Michael Praveen, A glimpse of printmaking in Goa

by Conrad Pinto, and photographic prints by Gopika Chowfla

Held at the Don Joao Lawns & Heritage House in Nagoa, North Goa, the 4 day festival will host visual arts exhibitions, dance, spoken word & poetry performances, live music, a travelling library for children and more and a selection of artisanal Goan eateries at the Food Waddo.

An artist-driven event supported entirely by the donations and patronage of art foundations, corporates & individual art lovers alike, the Goa Open Arts festival is organized by the following committee members:

Prashant Panjiar (former curator of photography programs at Sunaparanta and Serendipity); Gurpreet Sidhu (Co-Founder of People Tree Collective); Gopika Chowfla (Graphic Designer and visual artist previously exhibited at Serendipity Art Festival); Diptej Vernekar (Artist and founding member of the Goa Artist Collective); and Sitara Chowfla (Curator and former programme manager at India Art Fair)

The group hopes is to make this festival an annually recurring event with an aim to increase its footprint & collaborations with art institutions across India with each edition. In addition to the festival, the OPEN ARTS INITIATIVE is a permanent entity that intends to function throughout the year, in the form of public workshops, residencies, mentoring events, school interactions and plenty more.