TaFMA ‘Art Residency’ gets underway at RCEMPA

Our Correspondent

Kohima, Aug. 2 (EMN): A nine-day-long ‘Art Residency,’ organised by Task Force for Music and Arts (TaFMA) and Art for Change Foundation, commenced at the Regional Centre of Excellence for Music and Performing Arts (RCEMPA) in Jotsoma on Tuesday.

While the intention for holding the art residency is to create a cross-cultural experience, it also seeks to create a space for important conversations through artists’ works which they would be producing in the next few days.

Executive director of Art for Change Foundation, Isaac Gergan, said the main objective is to seek out the critical dialogues that can be addressed through conversations and through the art they produce.

It aims to create a cross-cultural experience whilst celebrating the context. He hoped the collaboration will have the synergy where artists can really come together and build a community.

Through the experience, they are looking forward to their artists to benefit from the conversations, the process of creating art together, exploring new mediums and making work that would encourage important and needful conversations through the work they produce, he added.

Gergan further said that the focus is more on the process instead of the product and encouraged youth and students to be a part of their creative process. In this regard, he informed that on Friday and Saturday after 2 pm, the doors would be kept open for interested artists.

The activities of the nine-daylong programme includes orientation, artist presentations on a daily basis where artists would share their work, a ‘chai time’ (tea time) where the artist would come together and share their thoughts and reflections. Along with that, resource speakers would come and share about different aspects of Nagaland.

Secretary of Youth Resource and Sports, Wezope Kenye, said that most of the Naga artists are running their own private stores to express their ideas and nourish themselves through the random need for painting.

Art has played a huge role in the Naga Society as it depicts how forefathers and ancestors have lived and how they celebrate through figures of drawings depicting their attires and cultures.

Old Portraits from the past are still being used in student living in the form of textbooks and storybooks where they promote and preserve ancient history, he said.

He added that Nagaland is the only state in India that hosts an office for music and arts which acts as an important wing of the Department of Youth Resources & Sports. TAFMA caters and promotes music and arts as an industry and gives a platform for growth and development of Naga musicians and artists.

TaFMA project director, Dr Hovithal Sothu, informed that a total of seven visual artists from within and outside the state would be actively participating in the residency programme. Once the artists finish their works, their works will be exhibited and made available for sale.

Of the seven artists, four are from Nagaland, and one each is from Delhi, Guwahati, and Kolkata. The major portion of the revenue generated from selling their works would go to the artists while a small portion each would be given to TafMA and Art for Change Foundation.

Art for Change Foundation is a New Delhi-based arts organisation founded with the conviction that art plays a profound role in exploring the question of human dignity and the common good.

Delhi-based artist, Jayita Barai (27), who is participating in the residency, said that she looked forward to interacting with the local artists as that would create conversations and dialogues of their practices and thereby learn from each other.

One of the participants, Tatsimu Trakha (23) who completed his BFA from Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata, in the Department of Modeling and Sculpture, hopes to learn more from his co-participants.