Art Education

About the theme

Higher education in the arts is an oft-ignored area for intervention. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, the Trusts are engaged in supporting newer methodologies of learning and teaching the arts, with a focus on supporting tertiary art education. Only by providing a dynamic educational backbone can we focus on capacity building and opening up gap areas of employment in the arts sector. Programmes are built through iterations and added upon to move towards wider impact.

Some of the projects undertaken in this vertical are:

• Students’ Biennale 2016 & 2018 editions and the Video Lab project conceived and implemented by Kochi Biennale Foundation
• Setting up of the Partition Archives in three universities in North India to enable researchers' safe access to oral history testimonies and narratives of the event and documenting a thorough process of the methodology to access sensitive archives effectively
• Pedagogical exhibitions ‘State of Architecture’ in 2016 and ‘State of Housing’ in 2018 by Urban Design Research Institute
• ‘India and the World: A History in Nine Stories’, a landmark exhibition at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), Mumbai, in partnership with the British Museum and the National Museum, New Delhi
• Supporting the pilot run of the MA in Performance Practice (Dance) at Ambedkar University Delhi. Read more about this project

State of Housing

“State of Housing: Aspirations, Imaginaries and Realities in India” was organized by Urban Design Research Institute in collaboration with the Architecture Foundation at the Goethe Institut, Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai. With over 10,000 persons visiting this pedagogical exhibition, the project culminated with publishing two readers that document the intense research done in the exhibition, as well as publishing 80 chronotopes of housing from across India.

Students’ Biennale 2018

The 2018 edition of the Students’ Biennale exhibits the work of over 200 art students who were selected via an open call from across 56 institutes in India. With this year’s theme of “Making as Thinking”, 6 curators conducted workshops across colleges in India and worked with teams of students to put up works at the ongoing Biennale. In addition, five educators engaged with different art schools to make interventions in traditional art curricula.