Opportunity

We invite proposals from artists in any visual arts discipline or film to propose work for inclusion in the Creative Interruptions Residency and Exhibition (details below), which will involve a month-long cost-free artist residency at Preet Nagar (http://preetnagarresidency.in/), an international art community founded in the 1930s and currently run by the Preet Lari Trust, in November 2018 and an exhibition of resulting work at Preet Nagar and in the city of Amritsar in February 2019. We seek, in particular, work that calls the past into the present by engaging with the local past, local communities (of artisans and others) and/or diversifies the voices represented to, and as, the public.

Background to the project

This project is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council research grant (UK) called Creative Interruptions (http://creativeinterruptions.net/) which seeks to use the arts and humanities as a tool for exploring and enabling grassroots creativity. The University of British Columbia (Canada) and the University of Strathclyde (UK) have collaborated with the Preet Nagar Trust (Indian Punjab) and CRCI (Delhi) to produce a series of opportunities to explore how research and practice can be enhanced through collaboration, and how the creative arts can enhance heritage management, and our theoretical understanding of it as a practice. To read more about past Preet Nagar residencies, see http://preetnagarresidency.in/.

In the Indian Punjab context, this project addresses local history, the history of diverse communities, and the importance of the past in the present. 2017 was the 70th anniversary of the Partition of the cultural and linguistic region of Punjab into the nation-states of India and Pakistan, which divided a once united and religiously integrated culture into two. This project seeks to address this troubled history as it relates to the lived experience of the past in the Indian Punjab and in relation to a range of memory projects that seek to excavate and recognize a once-shared past, as explored in the prior research of Project Lead from the University of Strathclyde, Churnjeet Mahn, and Anne Murphy of the University of British Columbia (Partition and the Practice of Memory, Palgrave, 2017). We invite artists to work on a combination of solo, collaborative and community-engaged projects to explore the issues of culture and memory in Punjab.

Background information

Date of residency: November 2018

The residency will include: 4 weeks of accommodation with meals at Preet Nagar, and a support budget of 20,000 INR for materials and resources. You will be offered advice on logistics locally, as well as contacts to local craftspeople/organizations. Participants will be required to provide proof of travel insurance (including emergency evacuation) and health insurance for the duration of the program. Each participant is responsible for securing funds for travel to the residency; this is not provided by the program.

Application information

To apply, please send (as a single compressed file): a 1-page summary of why you would like to come, a one-page preliminary description of the work you will pursue with up to three associated image, a CV, and 10 examples of your work (either as a PDF, jpeg, or weblinks; please include a one-page list of these samples, with details).

Applications due: June 10, 2018

Please send applications and enquiries to: churnjeet.mahn@strath.ac.uk