Sarai Reader 09: The Exhibition will not only initiate and bring new works to the public, but also generate a desire for an engaging vocabulary of, and ways of practicing and thinking about, art.

We are interested in producing the exhibition as a process that is generative of visions, concepts, speculations and projections which make room for heresy, for new modalities of being, for exchanges, relays and interferences. We see the exhibition as a situation of co-inhabitation in a space for a span of time by many agents and actors, in diverse, multiple, conjoined and contradictory ways. We hope that the exhibition can bring home to the viewer and the visitor a direct apprehension of different kinds of sensations of thought, speculation and enquiry. The exhibition intends to investigate the nature of the sensation of thinking, and to find fresh detours for understanding the body and the mind, and their resonating extensions into the myriad worlds that we inhabit and invent.

We desire the production of a wide range of shared and experimental methodologies and personal journeys that can be activated in a variety of ways. (See below for a spectrum of possibilities.)

The exhibition is a collaboration between Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, and the Sarai Programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.

Proposals and Episodes

The exhibition will take the form of a series of unfolding proposals and episodes that gather incrementally to produce a body of work that will signpost shifting co-ordinates of image and thought and map a new horizon marked by the encounter of art, sociability, research and commentary.

The exhibition will be punctuated through “episodes”. These episodes will be points of focus and dispersal, where processes that have been undertaken by artists during the unfolding of the exhibition will gather impetus and unravel across concentrated moments of public attention. There will be four episodes that will punctuate the process of the exhibition.

(1) Opening: 18th August , 2012
(2) Episode One: 13th October, 2012
(3) Episode Two: 15th December, 2012
(4) Episode Three: 3rd February, 2013

The invitation to selected proposals for the production of works will be staggered through the episodes. The exhibition space will keep transforming. Each episode will be a day-long public event, with workshops, performances, talks, discussions, special screenings and music.

Artists, researchers, scholars, curators, critics, filmmakers, writers, performers, dancers, musicians, magicians, activists, scientists, photographers, archivists, architects, poets, journalists, and more, are invited to make proposals that can be timed for specific durations.

Spectrum of Possibilities

Contributors and participants are invited to cross thresholds in their practice, to sight new promontories of thought, and make discoveries about themselves and their own work. That is why the call for proposals is not for “works” as such, but for new methodologies of practice that are embodied in works and processes. Here is a spectrum of possibilities. Over 9 months, the exhibition intends to investigate such methodologies and invent newer ones.

− Open Studio: Work 10am-5pm over a week, in the site, in a space within the exhibition. No specific work needs be made. Invite people for lunch discussions if you want.

− Art Writing: Proposals to develop a critical lexicon and vocabulary for contemporary art during the process of the exhibition.

− Process Practice: Works that can be developed over the duration of the full exhibition. The emphasis here would be on how a work will be developed over the nine months.

− Relay and Serial Processes: Works that will be built in a serial way by three or four or more participants from one episode to the next.

− Extended Network Practice: Works where the artist/practitioner/researcher will involve more people to extend the practice that they initiate.

− Repetition Works: Works that will be done by an individual or group of participants, then repeated faithfully by two more people that they invite.

− Instruction Works: Works which will function both as a set of instructions, and also a performance of those instructions by different people, including the initiator.

− Soap Opera/Crime Story: The exhibition site as a location for shooting a soap opera or a crime story: Same scene of the crime, developed over time by different people, or a soap opera that unfolds in the site.

− Audition: Ongoing theatre "auditions" in the space: "Audition" becomes the thematic, or the larger fabric, with many smaller punctuations within it.

− A Photographic Billboard: An invitation to proposals that will think through and make a set of paired – one big, one small – images.

− Slideshow: A presentation loop of an idea or a conjecture or an argument - using powerpoint or keynote - produced as a work.

− Mis-en-Scene: A stage that is slowly transformed into a set that becomes a multi-purpose site. A mis-en-scene that will be developed within the context of the exhibition.

− Broadsheet: Making a newsprint broadsheet: The proposal could be in the form of an idea, a set of questions or thematics that would be explored, and so on.

Cybermohalla Hub : A Complex of Practices

Additionally, proposals are also invited for processes and activities to inhabit the Cybermohalla Hub – an architectural speculation that will be built into the exhibition.

A 1:1 prototype of the building, Cybermohalla Hub, will be constructed in the courtyard of the Devi building. It has been collaboratively designed by Cybermohalla Ensemble and two Frankfurt based architects, Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Muller over the last 5 years. The Cybermohalla Hub will host innumerable acts and situations, and through a combination of participating artists and guests, create its own curated program, which will run through the duration of the exhibition.

What do you need to do?

- Send us a brief outline (of no more than four A4 pages) in words and with sketches, instructions, images, drawings, plans – wherever necessary – of what you would like to do for Sarai Reader 09: The Exhibition, along with a brief CV and images of a selection of your works. Proposals may be submitted in English or in Hindi.

- Outline a clear time line of how you intend to realize your proposal.

The curatorial team will select proposals based on the ability of the proposals to respond to the challenges set out by the call, and on the feasibility of their actualization.

Logistics, Support, etc.

The authors of the selected proposals (who can be individuals, collectives, groups, ensembles) will be given a budget of max INR 15,000 for meeting their cost of production, and a nominal fee for their contribution. We plan to invite around 100 participants to this process, so the production support will vary, depending on the materials and modality of the work.

On-site support will be available and participants will need to make requests for support, which will be considered to the extent possible. There will be certain guidelines regarding the way parts of the building can be accessed and worked in.

Works produced during the exhibition will remain the property of the artists.

Outstation participants will get travel and accommodation support.

The Book

The exhibition will be accompanied by a book – Sarai Reader 09 : Projections. (See HERE for call for contributions to the book). An open studio dedicated to the design and production of the Sarai Reader 09 book will be active on-site for the duration of the exhibition. The book will not be a catalogue of the exhibition. Nor will Sarai Reader 09 : The Exhibition be a curated illustration of the concepts advanced by the book. Rather, the book and the exhibition will both act as adjacent platforms from which new ideas and concepts, discursive as well as aesthetic, will set off as traveling companions and find their separate yet occasionally converging itineraries.

Deadlines

Send in your proposals by:

1st Deadline : 4th August, 2012
2nd Deadline : 21st September, 2012
3rd Deadline : 2nd November, 2012

All proposals should be sent in hard copy (marked ATTN: Sarai Reader 09) to:

Programme Coordinator
Sarai-CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road
Delhi 110054