Serendipity Arts Residency 2025: Question, disrupt and dream

As the eighth Serendipity Arts Residency, supporting experimental artistic practices, draws to an end, it continues to serve as a vital platform for emerging voices across disciplines, enabling them to question, disrupt and dream. The three-month programme culminates with Open Studio of the Serendipity Arts Residency 2025, which is not just a showcase of artistic output, but a celebration of dynamicity, vulnerability and artistic companionship.

From August 2–8, the Foundation’s spaces in Defence Colony transformed into an ever-shifting constellation of images, ideas, textures and emotions, offering an intimate glimpse into the artistic world of six young artists and cultural practitioners. The Open Studio is also part of Serendipity Arts Foundation’s year-long lead-up to the 10th edition of Serendipity Arts Festival, which will take place in Goa from December 12–21. The works presented here will travel to Goa as part of the Festival’s programming, alongside a rich slate of multidisciplinary projects across visual arts, performance, culinary, accessibility and more.

This year’s residents included Anishaa Tavag, Anshumaan Sathe, Malavika Bhatia, Ningkhan Keishing and Valia Russo, with Harshada Vijay as the Programmer-in-Residence. Over the course of three months, they shared studio walls and meals, collaborated on ideas and meandered between disciplines.

At the heart of this year’s curatorial thread is the idea of “chance”. Harshada Vijay observed early into the residency that all six residents were engaging, whether consciously or intuitively, with the unknown: letting materials dictate form, inviting others into their processes and opening up their work to the unpredictable. “Chance became the quiet anchor of the residency,” she says. “It revealed itself in experiments, in serendipitous meetings between mediums and artists, and in the space between control and surrender.”

Smriti Rajgarhia, Director, Serendipity Arts, reflects on eight years of the programme: “What excites me most about this edition is how seamlessly collaboration, vulnerability, and experimentation have come together. The works you’ll encounter are not just reflections of individual journeys, but of a shared ecosystem of care and risk-taking.”

RESIDENTS AND THEIR WORKS:

Come Play With Me by Anshumaan Sathe

‘Come Play With Me’ is a series of intimate portraits emerging from conversations, letters and sketching workshops with fellow trans people. These aren’t traditional nude studies. They’re imagined self-portraits rooted in desire, being unapologetic, humour and tenderness, where each collaborator reclaims how they want to be seen. Created through interviews, workshops, and collaborative drawing sessions with friends and lovers, Anshumaan’s portraits are defiant love letters that unravel pleasure, and joy with honesty.

Archive of Impossible Ecologies by Malavika Bhatia

Fungus and language become co-conspirators in Malavika’s deeply personal collaboration with Schizophyllum commune, a resilient fungal species — resulting in decomposing installations that respond to touch, breath and time. Their project weaves together a Punjabi riddle about mushrooms, colonial archives, living fungal cultures and the displacement of ancestral memory. A mycelial book that literally grows and rots becomes the centerpiece, offering no fixed interpretation, but subject to constant transformation.

Hi Bi Kadlekai by Anishaa Tavag

Anishaa is a performance artiste from Bangalore, who explores her fluid relationship with masculinity and desire through dance. The movement-based performance installation reflects on fluid identity and the shapeshifting nature of desire. Drawing from childhood stereotypes of Bollywood heroes, the performance questions masculinity and who can inhabit it. The work is both vulnerable and playful, shifting between embodiment and longing, and asks viewers to reflect on their own fantasies of becoming and being seen.

Phunga Wari (Lusivi) by Ningkhan Keishing

Ceramicist Ningkhan Keishing draws from his Tangkhul Naga heritage, paying homage to the oral traditions of his home in Manipur. Inspired by a story his mother once told him, he constructs a large ceramic interpretation of a traditional wood stove — a humble, essential domestic object which has three legs, symbolising mother, father, and the spirit. The form becomes a vessel for memory, storytelling and intergenerational wisdom. Rooted in indigenous practice and contemporary abstraction, Ningkhan’s work invites viewers to slow down, sit with silence, and enter into his family’s folk tale.

Pédiluve by Valia Russo

An interdisciplinary artist working across photography, performance and sculpture, French artist Valia Russo, who is here as part of the Villa Swagatam exchange, investigates the overflow of digital images and the psychic residue they leave behind. Constructed from urban waste, personal photos and botanical material, his mixed-media installation references the French word for a cleansing footbath, a space one enters before stepping into sanctity.

On till August 8