Open Call | KIPAF - 2019 | this is not a joke
'JOKE'
"ম্যাও ম্যাও ম্যাও বাকুম বাকুম ভৌ ভৌ ভৌ চীঁহি"
Joke as a form is probably as old as laughter itself and over millennia evolved into a subversive form of critique. In its various forms of rawness, sophistication, eloquence, wit, criticality, sarcasm, irony and such, it transcends the boundaries of language and culture with utmost grace and illuminates the context with a lightness of being while at the same time assuming the role of one of the most powerful weapons of our times. How can performance leverage this universal nature of the form and concept of Joke to transpire an action? Between the thought and action, where does a joke lie? How can joke address our crucial immediate existence and global condition? And finally what necessitates and inspires a joke?
kipaf19
Curatorial team
Yuzuru Maeda, Srinivas Mangipudi,
Mome Bhattacharya, Santhosh Kr. Sakhinala.
Curatorial Assistant: Anupam Saikia
------------------------------
KIPAF (Kolkata International Performance Art Festival) is an annual event organized by an independent artist group originated in Kolkata. The festival was initiated in 2013 to annually open up the city of Kolkata to diverse ways of performance and intervention. It aims to be a platform for dialogue between site, art, politics, and culture. KIPAF was conceived to address the nascent nature of Performance Art in India and continues to play a significant role in the practice, pedagogy, and outreach of performance art in South Asia. KIPAF holds together a fairly big group of artists and artist-organizers together during the festival and thus our concern with the form of hosting and organizing the Festival is to work out the formal and informal, circumstantial, performative and everyday ways of living through shared hospitality.
The Festival happens every year from 23rd to 26th January. KIPAF is acquiring pedagogical significance as many students from institutions like Gov. Art College, Kolkata, Kala Bhavan Shantiniketan, Fine Arts College Surat, Kashmir Art College, have been participating as both observers and young artists in the Open Section category of the Festival. The independent nature of KIPAF has been maintained by constantly developing alternate modes of fundraising, by making street paintings, live art, sticker and postcard campaigns. Since 2015 KIPAF initiated pre-Festival workshops in performance in view of expanding the pedagogic space of Performance Art. We invite artists to come a week before KIPAF and initiate workshops. KIPAF ‘13,’14,‘15,‘16,‘17 & 18 have got participation from Bangladesh, Nepal, Philippines, Japan, Israel, Korea, Belgium, Italy, UK, Indonesia, Australia, France, Switzerland, USA & various parts of India.
We are a group of artists, put together this Festival in our individual capacities by bringing together our limited individual resources and some help from our friends. The Festival is a humble effort to create a possibility for artists from across different places of the globe to come together and share each other's artistic and intellectual resources. This is our ideological and political choice to be. Thus are unable to offer the artists remuneration or travel expenses to and from Kolkata, we, however, take the responsibility of the curated artists’ stay, food and local conveyance in the city. We will share the same with all participants as much as we can stretch our limits.
