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How to Think in 3D
A workshop on paper sculptures
Facilitated by Gagan Singh
16 September 2022, 12 noon – 4:00 pm
KNMA Saket
Part of the Methods series
Registrations for this workshop is now closed.

In this one day ‘Drawing Intervention’ workshop, participants will explore the idea of making sculptures with paper and delve into the process of intervening a site. The workshop will help participants address questions such as how does one see and respond to a location as well as the forms paper evolves into when cut. The workshop will tackle these basic enquiries and understand the tension between seeing a location and working with paper.
Interested and committed participants (18+) are expected to attend the entire duration of the workshop. Art material and refreshments will be provided. The onsite workshop with limited seats will be held at KNMA Saket.
Gagan Singh primarily defines himself as a Delhi-based object, and a visual artist dabbling in drawing - different modes of narration including illustrations, installations, storytelling, wall art and artist books. He is influenced by perception and explores various themes including everyday life, relationships, human nature through a satirical lens with the element of humour acting as an access point.
Born in 1975, Singh graduated from the Kent Institute of Art & Design, UK in 2005 with a Masters in Drawing. He has showcased his works in various solo and group exhibitions across the world including What I did Everyday (2019), Line Bombs (2014) in Mumbai; Mati Ghar (2014) in New Delhi; and The Drawing Project (2013) in Florida among others.
Methods : A series of artist led medium workshops organised by KNMA
The force driving at the crux of the segment has been to re-examine the mandate of a medium centric ‘workshop’ and looks beyond the usual format of craft-hobby workroom sessions. At the heart of each session is a chosen artist with their unique style of expression and fashioned in an actively interactive module of facilitator-participant format. This KNMA series highlights how the paradigmatic shifts in contemporary art making need to be registered at individual levels and not merely as institutional applied skill dissemination. The workshop opens up room for both artists and non-artists as well as keen learners to interact with practitioners from a wide spectrum of styles and media to reimagine the tools and raw material for art making - ranging from drawings, maps, personal memories to printing techniques to textual excerpts to found or broken objects, just to name a few.
Module curators: Neha Tickoo and Madhurima Chaudhuri
Stitching Landscapes
Facilitated by Nidhi Khurana
16 July 2022 | 11:00 am to 3:00 pm
Onsite workshop at KNMA Saket
Part of the Methods Series
Registration for this workshop is closed.

A landscape refers to “all the visible features of an area of land, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal”. During this workshop we will create individual artworks exploring the idea of a landscape by the process of stitching and using layers of cloth. Instead of paints and brushes, we will employ shape, color and texture along with basic hand stitching to execute the artworks. The malleable qualities of the textile allow it to absorb and withstand imprints, knitting, plating, bunching, tearing, and stitching.
Interested and committed participants (18+) are expected to attend the entire duration of the workshop. Participants are encouraged to bring their own images related to the topic as well as cloth scraps/old textile pieces that can be used. Art material and refreshments will be provided. The onsite workshop with limited seats will be held at KNMA Saket.
Nidhi Khurana is an artist and educator based in New Delhi. Born in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, she completed her Bachelors in Visual Arts with a specialization in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, Gujarat in 2003 followed by a Masters in Art from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her studio work takes the form of drawings, textiles, carpets, prints, artist-books, and sculptures to reflect upon the role of the human within nature. In her recent works she explores her relationship with the natural world by mapping her experiences as cyclical graphs of time, inspired by a diversity in cognitive approaches such as the Australian aboriginal dreamtime, the Mappaemundi, the yatra or pilgrimage maps and representations from Mughal and Islamic cosmological diagrams. Nidhi has completed a yearlong Artist residency program at the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste Braunschweig, funded by the State of Lower Saxony (BS Projects Scholarship 2018-19) Germany.
Methods: A series of artist led medium workshops organised by KNMA.
The force driving at the crux of the segment has been to re-examine the mandate of a medium centric ‘workshop’ and looks beyond the usual format of craft-hobby workroom sessions. At the heart of each session is a chosen artist with their unique style of expression and fashioned in an actively interactive module of facilitator-participant format. This KNMA series highlights how the paradigmatic shifts in contemporary art making need to be registered at individual levels and not merely as institutional applied skill dissemination. The workshop opens up room for both artists and non-artists as well as keen learners to interact with practitioners from a wide spectrum of styles and media to reimagine the tools and raw material for art making - ranging from drawings, maps, personal memories to printing techniques to textual excerpts to found or broken objects, just to name a few.
Program curators: Neha Tickoo and Madhurima Chaudhuri
Sun Printed Maps
A Cyanotype Workshop
Facilitated by Nidhi Khurana and Jaimini Jariwala
18 June 2022 | 2:00 pm to 6:00 pm
Onsite workshop at KNMA Saket
Part of the Methods Series

Creating a map can be seen as one way to organize information to make sense of the world. We study maps to understand cultural markers of a specific time. In the present, maps can be accessed in real time over digital imaging devices. This makes the older maps redundant in terms of their use. The very idea that gave birth to a map (of collecting and relating/relaying specific information) has been turned upon its head. If the map was never an accurate document, then why do we see it as one?
Used in the broadest sense, a map reflects the time it is created in. Over a period of time, physical spaces evolve into sites for exploration and provide an opportunity for first-hand mapping to take place. We each have our own maps, our own sense of time in how we see the world. This workshop uses the process of cyanotype to think about maps and the process of map making.
Interested and committed participants (18+) are expected to attend the entire duration of the workshop. Art material and refreshments will be provided. The onsite workshop with limited seats will be held at KNMA Saket.
Nidhi Khurana is an artist and educator based in New Delhi. Born in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, she completed her Bachelors in Visual Arts with a specialization in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, Gujarat in 2003 followed by a Masters in Art from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her studio work takes the form of drawings, textiles, carpets, prints, artist-books, and sculptures to reflect upon the role of the human within nature. In her recent works she explores her relationship with the natural world by mapping her experiences as cyclical graphs of time, inspired by a diversity in cognitive approaches such as the Australian aboriginal dreamtime, the Mappaemundi, the yatra or pilgrimage maps and representations from Mughal and Islamic cosmological diagrams. Nidhi has completed a yearlong Artist residency program at the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste Braunschweig, funded by the State of Lower Saxony (BS Projects Scholarship 2018-19) Germany.
Jaimini Jariwala is a visual artist and printmaker based in Surat. She completed her Masters in printmaking and graphics from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara in 2017. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Visual arts (painting) from Surat School of Fine Arts, Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, Surat. Jaimini has received the Space Studio Craft Residency 2022 and was a resident artist at Priyashri Studio in Vadodara in 2019. She has been a part of many workshops and exhibitions including the Verna Biennale in 2018 and the Pune Biennale in 2015. Jaimini is a recipient of the Prafulla Dahanukar Gujarat State Award in 2017.
Methods: A series of artist led medium workshops organised by KNMA
The force driving at the crux of the segment has been to re-examine the mandate of a medium centric ‘workshop’ and looks beyond the usual format of craft-hobby workroom sessions. At the heart of each session is a chosen artist with their unique style of expression and fashioned in an actively interactive module of facilitator-participant format. This KNMA series highlights how the paradigmatic shifts in contemporary art making need to be registered at individual levels and not merely as institutional applied skill dissemination. The workshop opens up room for both artists and non-artists as well as keen learners to interact with practitioners from a wide spectrum of styles and media to reimagine the tools and raw material for art making - ranging from drawings, maps, personal memories to printing techniques to textual excerpts to found or broken objects, just to name a few.
Program curators: Neha Tickoo and Madhurima Chaudhuri
Visualising Care
Facilitated by BlueJackal
28 May 2022
Part of the Methods Series
Closed door workshop for CEHRO educators only

The workshop facilitated by Shefalee Jain from BlueJackal will open up discussions around caregiving through storytelling and visualization. The participants will be introduced to various forms in which they could narrate as well as visually depict their stories of care.
BlueJackal is a platform for engaging with, creating and publishing visual narratives, comics, picture books and initiating dialogue and learning within these contexts through interactive programs. It is run by three core members, Shivangi Singh, Shefalee Jain and Lokesh Khodke and projects team member Sharvari Deshpande.
Methods: A series of artist led medium workshops organised by KNMA
The force driving at the crux of the segment has been to re-examine the mandate of a medium centric ‘workshop’ and looks beyond the usual format of craft-hobby workroom sessions. At the heart of each session is a chosen artist with their unique style of expression and fashioned in an actively interactive module of facilitator-participant format. This KNMA series highlights how the paradigmatic shifts in contemporary art making need to be registered at individual levels and not merely as institutional applied skill dissemination. The workshop opens up room for both artists and non-artists as well as keen learners to interact with practitioners from a wide spectrum of styles and media to reimagine the tools and raw material for art making - ranging from drawings, maps, personal memories to printing techniques to textual excerpts to found or broken objects, just to name a few.
Program curators: Neha Tickoo and Madhurima Chaudhuri
Qisse Khane aur Khilane Ke
A Workshop on Handmade Illustrated Books
Facilitated by BlueJackal
09 April 2022 | 2:00pm to 5:00 pm
Onsite workshop at KNMA Saket
Part of the Methods Series
Registration for this workshop is closed.
Who is the diner, the maker, the gatherer, the cook? Who is the hunter and who is the prey? What is yummy and what is yucky? Who gets to eat the most and who the least? Gather your memories and get ready to cook up some stories!
This workshop focuses on creating handmade illustrated books while exploring oral folklore and stories revolving around food. This interactive workshop is discussion and activity-based. Participants will be encouraged to explore oral tales related to farming, foraging, hunting, fishing, cooking, eating and stories from the kitchen.
Interested and committed participants (18+) are expected to attend the entire duration of the workshop and take active part in the discussion. Art material and refreshments will be provided. Limited seats only.
BlueJackal is a platform for engaging with, creating and publishing visual narratives, comics, picture books and initiating dialogue and learning within these contexts through interactive programs. It is run by three core members, Shivangi Singh, Shefalee Jain and Lokesh Khodke and projects team member Sharvari Deshpande.
BlueJackal was born in 2015 of a desire for, as well as the ever receding possibility of, togetherness. We see coming together with all its temporariness, contradictoriness, conflict as well as possibilities. As writers, artists, researchers we have often felt compelled by and yet wary of what constitutes the 'limits' or the defining borders of our callings. We have realized both, the need to draw these strategic boundaries and the will to dissolve them. BlueJackal is a platform for exploring this conundrum in its creative, political and philosophical dimensions. We are interested in seeing what 'contamination' and 'cross breeding' through unforeseen associations can bring to this platform.
Methods: A series of artist led medium workshops organised by KNMA
The force driving at the crux of the segment has been to re-examine the mandate of a medium centric ‘workshop’ and looks beyond the usual format of craft-hobby workroom sessions. At the heart of each session is a chosen artist with their unique style of expression and fashioned in an actively interactive module of facilitator-participant format. This KNMA series highlights how the paradigmatic shifts in contemporary art making need to be registered at individual levels and not merely as institutional applied skill dissemination. The workshop opens up room for both artists and non-artists as well as keen learners to interact with practitioners from a wide spectrum of styles and media to reimagine the tools and raw material for art making - ranging from drawings, maps, personal memories to printing techniques to textual excerpts to found or broken objects, just to name a few.
Program curators: Neha Tickoo and Madhurima Chaudhuri
Mark Making through Sight, Sound and Colour
Workshop using Water Colours and Audio
Facilitated by Devika Sundar
04 March 2022, 3:00pm to 6:00 pm
Part of the Methods Series

Mark making describes the gestural language of lines, dots, marks, patterns, and textures created in an artwork. Through this three-hour long online workshop, we explore mark making through pen and watercolour - softly listening, recording and responding to the spaces and sounds surrounding us. Experimenting with freeing, loosening watercolour techniques and exercises, we interpret shifting moods through music and audio - exploring quick, sensory expressions and exchanges with line, print, texture, and colour.
The workshop is open to all participants who are 18 years and above. The session will take place on Zoom.
Materials required:
Sketchbook A4 size or A4 sheets (Preferably cartridge or watercolour paper), watercolour set - cakes or tubes, round brush - Size 8 / 10, small bowl for water, palette or an old plate for mixing colours, pen, pencil and a compass or a round shaped object/ cup to trace a circular form.
Found Materials for Textures and Prints: Cotton, tissue, discarded plastic, mesh, used or empty medicine tablet strips, earbuds, bubble wrap, sponge, loofah, salt, old toothbrush and dried leaves, flowers, sticks and stones.
Keep ready: Any found audio recording (Examples: could be sound recordings of rain, waves at sea, leaves rustling, wind blowing, fan whirring, kitchen sounds, tap water running, people talking / laughing, etc).
And a song/ track that you found yourself recurrently listening to through lockdown / over the last year.
Parallel to her practice, Devika founded and facilitates Hanno Terrace studio - A collective, outdoor open studio, intended to facilitate art as a therapeutic medium of release and outlet for children and adults from diverse backgrounds. Extending themes explored within her individual practice, she develops these into an accessible and inclusive language through dialogic art group workshops and personalised exercises conducted at the studio.
Methods: A series of artist led medium workshops organised by KNMA
The force driving at the crux of the segment has been to re-examine the mandate of a medium centric ‘workshop’ and looks beyond the usual format of craft-hobby workroom sessions. At the heart of each session is a chosen artist with their unique style of expression and fashioned in an actively interactive module of facilitator-participant format. This KNMA series highlights how the paradigmatic shifts in contemporary art making need to be registered at individual levels and not merely as institutional applied skill dissemination. The workshop opens up room for both artists and non-artists as well as keen learners to interact with practitioners from a wide spectrum of styles and media to reimagine the tools and raw material for art making - ranging from drawings, maps, personal memories to printing techniques to textual excerpts to found or broken objects, just to name a few.
Module curators: Neha Tickoo and Madhurima Chaudhuri.
Lines That Come Alive
Workshop on Hand-Drawn 2-D Animation
Facilitated by Anarya
24 - 25 February 2022, 4:00pm to 6:00 pm
Part of the Methods Series

In this two-day online intensive workshop, participants will learn to create short hand-drawn animations using simple mobile phone applications. They will be introduced to 2D animation methods and tools. The process will bring in an understanding of movement and time through immersive drawing sessions. Participants will be encouraged to observe their surroundings to find slow movements and convert simple line drawings into animations.
The workshop is open to all participants who are 18 years and above. Interested participants are expected to commit their presence on all days. The sessions will take place on Zoom
Materials required:
A4 copier papers or printing sheets (thickness 75 gsm), pencil, black pen, scissors or cutter and pencil colours or crayons.
Participants also need to download the following animation application in their mobile phones prior to the workshop- Application: Stop Motion Studio for Android and iMotion for iPhone or iPad
Anarya is an illustrator, animator and art educator based in Delhi, lndia. In her art practice she dabbles into various themes through visual storytelling, some of them being - gender, humour, environment and all things absurd and uncomfortable. She is one of the co-creators of Dreams Across Borders, an artist collective supported by Creating Heroines, British Council. Presently she is working as Programmes Manager at Artreach India. Her role as an art educator often feeds into her own artistic practice. You can find her loitering with her sketchbook or staring up at the trees, stalking birds.
Methods: A series of artist led medium workshops organised by KNMA
The force driving at the crux of the segment has been to re-examine the mandate of a medium centric ‘workshop’ and looks beyond the usual format of craft-hobby workroom sessions. At the heart of each session is a chosen artist with their unique style of expression and fashioned in an actively interactive module of facilitator-participant format. This KNMA series highlights how the paradigmatic shifts in contemporary art making need to be registered at individual levels and not merely as institutional applied skill dissemination. The workshop opens up room for both artists and non-artists as well as keen learners to interact with practitioners from a wide spectrum of styles and media to reimagine the tools and raw material for art making - ranging from drawings, maps, personal memories to printing techniques to textual excerpts to found or broken objects, just to name a few.
Module curators: Neha Tickoo and Madhurima Chaudhuri
Fragile, Handle with Care
A Workshop on Working with Letters and Texts
Facilitated by Anuja Ghosalkar
07 – 08 January 2022, 4.00 to 6.00 pm
Part of the Methods Series
Register Now

The workshop entails participants to look into their collection of letters, emails, post cards, greeting cards, handwritten or typed, on fraying paper or scribbled on note pads— fragile documents of ourselves and our exchanges with those close to us. The intent is to read these documents together and through it access our personal collections and find a performative language in the act of reading. Reading here constitutes the literal act or interpretation, by re-writing, underlining, folding, drawing over words, texts. A response to the objects, materials presented, but with fragility.
Fragile, handle with care is designed to look carefully at documents that may have been forgotten. For this workshop along with letters, participants can bring in receipts, notebooks, diaries, pamphlets, emails or what’s app exchanges—ephemera that participants have saved or stored for reasons unknown, strange or deliberate. Participants will be encouraged to share these with the group and work with them together, with their trepidations, vulnerabilities.
This workshop stems from a performance that Anuja Ghosalkar has designed and curated since 2016, called The Reading Room. In The Reading Room, there are no performers, a closed audience of ten to 12 people bring in letters from their personal collections and read them alongside ones curated from the public domain. At the end of each Reading Room the letters are donated to Ghosalkar— that become part of future readings. Over the years Ghosalkar has collected over 80 letters— intimate letters between mothers and daughters or between lovers, official correspondence, historical exchanges, printouts of emails with emojis, form part of this collection.
The workshop is open to all participants who are 18 years and above. Interested participants are expected to commit their presence on all days. The sessions will take place on Zoom.
Material Required:
Pen, Paper, Notebook, Drawing or Painting Supplies (optional), and most importantly their set of documents, photocopied or printed. Participants should ideally be present with the documents and texts on Day 1
The workshop is open to all participants who are 18 years and above. Interested participants are expected to commit their presence on all days. The sessions will take place on Zoom.
The workshop looks at the act of reading everyday documents with care, as a performative act, and perhaps a gentle mode of questioning grand historical narratives. The gesture of searching and uttering words from a private collection may lead us to the start of a small but significant resistance. The workshop also focusses on forgotten objects of communication in our homes, that are fragile and need to be handled with care rather than carelessness.
Anuja Ghosalkaris the founder of Drama Queen—a Documentary theatre company, evolving a unique form of theatre in India since 2015. Her practice focuses on personal histories, archival absences and blurring the hierarchies between audience and performer—to extend the idea of theatre to create audacious work. Iterations around form and process, modes of (social) media, sites, technologies, reclaiming narratives on gender and intimacy are critical to her performance making and pedagogy.
Her performances and workshops have been programmed by University of Oxford, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Sophiensale, Serendipity Arts Festival, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Forum Transregionale –ZMO, Frankfurt University, among others. Anuja is the co-curator of the international workshop series on Documentary Theatre with Kai Tuchmann—that programmed artists like Gob Squad, Boris Nikitin, Rimini Protokoll, Zhao Chuan. She co-curated VR based performances for the Serendipity Arts Virtual 2020. As visiting faculty at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology she leads practice based pedagogy. She has written on film and performance for Nang Magazine, Art India, Bioscope, Hakara
Her recent work The Lonely Hearts Club, started as an instagram handle in March 2020, is now an online show about voyeurism, relationships with screens and erotica. Her newest live performance premiered at Sophiensale, Berlin in November 2021– I Promise the Bearer frames questions about art, money and why we return to the theatre.
Methods: A series of artist led medium workshops organised by KNMA
The force driving at the crux of the segment has been to re-examine the mandate of a medium centric ‘workshop’ and looks beyond the usual format of craft-hobby workroom sessions. At the heart of each session is a chosen artist with their unique style of expression and fashioned in an actively interactive module of facilitator-participant format. This KNMA series highlights how the paradigmatic shifts in contemporary art making need to be registered at individual levels and not merely as institutional applied skill dissemination. The workshop opens up room for both artists and non-artists as well as keen learners to interact with practitioners from a wide spectrum of styles and media to reimagine the tools and raw material for art making - ranging from drawings, maps, personal memories to printing techniques to textual excerpts to found or broken objects, just to name a few.
Module curators: Neha Tickoo and Madhurima Chaudhuri
Working from Memory
An Introduction to Storytelling and Photo-book Making
Facilitated by Chandan Gomes
29 - 30 November 2021, 4:00 – 7:00 pm
Part of the Methods Series
Register Now

In this day and age when photography has become so accessible due to powerful cameras on our phones and digital sharing platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram etc. How does one tell stories amidst this surge of data and information?
This two-day workshop aims to introduce participants to the basics of narrative building – how to use photographs in their phones and cameras to tell stories. These photographs need not be from any particular project or documentation, but can be snippets from one’s daily life or travels. In the workshop participants will also be introduced to the basics of bookmaking where they’ll be working towards creating simple book objects and playing with photographs which otherwise would have remained lost in their computers and phones.
The workshop is open to all participants who are 18 years and above. Interested participants are expected to commit their presence on all days. The sessions will take place on Zoom.
Registered participants are expected to be present on Day 1 of the workshop with a selection of 15-20 digital images (.JPEG) of not more than 5 MB each. To ease the process there are three themes the participant can choose from, but they are not binding and the subject matter can vary.
Themes:
My city and how I relate/connect to it.
Self-Portraiture but No Selfies.
Biographical photographs of a close family member or a friend.
The workshop will be taught through a combination of open but structured conversations, screening of works, readings and demonstrations.
Chandan Gomes has studied Philosophy at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. Emotional and intellectual anxieties drive him as an artist. He has taught at Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts & Communications, Delhi, National Institute of Design, Gandhinagar and Ashoka University, Haryana. He is currently working on his first film and dreams of opening a stationery shop one day. He has won numerous awards and fellowships and has been exhibited widely – Les Recontres d’Arles, France (2018, supported by PHOTOINK), Kochi Muziris Biennale (2018-19), Foto Fest Biennale, Houston (2018), Serendipity Arts Festival (2018), Asia House, London (2018), Zeytiburnu International Photography Festival, Istanbul (2018) and Benaki Museum, Athens (2016), amongst other places. His most recent exhibitions were held at MMAG Foundation, Amman (2020), Landskrona Museum (2019) and Rubenstein Arts Centre (2019). He was also the artist in residence at Centre for Documentary Studies, Duke University (2019).
Methods: A series of artist led medium workshops organised by KNMA
The force driving at the crux of the segment has been to re-examine the mandate of a medium centric ‘workshop’ and looks beyond the usual format of craft-hobby workroom sessions. At the heart of each session is a chosen artist with their unique style of expression and fashioned in an actively interactive module of facilitator-participant format. This KNMA series highlights how the paradigmatic shifts in contemporary art making need to be registered at individual levels and not merely as institutional applied skill dissemination. The workshop opens up room for both artists and non-artists as well as keen learners to interact with practitioners from a wide spectrum of styles and media to reimagine the tools and raw material for art making - ranging from drawings, maps, personal memories to printing techniques to textual excerpts to found or broken objects, just to name a few.
Module curators: Neha Tickoo and Madhurima Chaudhuri
Be Water, Shapeshift & Thinking with the Mangroves
A four-day online intensive exploring the game-world and protest spaces
With Gayatri Kodikal
27 - 30 October 2021, 4.00 to 7.00 pm
THE ARTISTS’ WAY #7
A Series of Intensives

Shapeshifting has been encountered through myth, stories, fables, poems and images. From ancient oral narratives to contemporary video games. A recurring symbolic motif from across all cultures, and through almost all mediums of storytelling, emerging as a rhizomatic reaction with no point of origin or hierarchies, shapeshifting tells of living not only at the marginal, the threshold and liminal spaces, but also from the void of Western ontologies. In its contemporary political avatars, shapeshifting is performed through the contemporary protester, digital fugitive and the stateless. The contemporary protester strategizes with camouflage and constantly re-establishes the protest space that is momentary and transformative.
Gayatri Kodikal imagines shapeshifting as a way of endurance and compassion, to be with and to stay with each other in relation to the other. There is much need for a communal and collective shapeshifting exercise that could help the political economic climate depart from a definitive structure of law and control, to a much larger, inclusive, permeable, nomadic channel of organizing ourselves with our differences. In that sense, shapeshifting escapes classification and definition, and this quality gives it the potency to be critical and political. Since the shapeshifter and shapeshifting has been present in our collective consciousness since early civilizations, then it can perhaps become a fascinating lens to look at contemporary political strategies of embodied transformation that is continuous and emancipatory. Gayatri has been evolving the mangrove game world and shapeshifting mangrove archives as part of her artistic research and practice. And this four-day intensive emerges from her ongoing explorations of shapeshifting as a poetic apparatus for world-making and strategies of embodiment in contemporary politics.
The mangrove as a game world holds forth refuge, resistance and reconciliation. How does thinking with the mangroves reimagine ways of coexisting and resisting capitalist capture? The four days of this intensive will study and generate multiple potentials and strategies for the contemporary protester and protest space (both digital and IRL) through the study of shapeshifting as a narrative trope. Keeping the mangrove as a guiding metaphor for the study, participants will experiment with simple world building tools and game mechanics to propose political strategies for contemporary embodiment.
This intensive is playful, collaborative and exercise-based. Through the four days, participants will be invited to play, make, construct their own game-world journeys, settings and narrative environments and space of thought and associations to explore a variety of positions and perspectives. Participants will lead a collective enquiry into game making as a mode of storytelling
Participants will have access to the research material, resources and reading list prior to the sessions. This online intensive is free. Interested participants are expected to commit their presence on all days and participate in group discussions with their own examples and understanding. The age limit for participation is 18 years and above. The intensive may explore the possibility of further collaborative work towards the end.
Gayatri Kodikal is an artist and writer. She works with moving image, sound and esoteric game worlds. She indulges in the speculative, the historical, science fiction and feminist narratives. She is based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
This is the seventh program of the ‘The Artists’ Way’ series of intensives, organized by KNMA, with the focus on artistic research as new pedagogies of the future. These intensives have been conceptualized and led by practicing artists who have been using workshops and different pedagogic formats as part of their art-making process, often collaborating with different groups and forming their own personal, formal and informal networks of learning and unlearning. Each intensive is unique, different in format, scope and methodology, wherein artists also share their related research. ‘The Artists’ Way’ program is outlined by Akansha Rastogi, with Madhurima Chaudhuri, Neha Tickoo and Priya Chandra.