The third edition of the Goa Open Arts Foundation’s biennial festival that’s going to conclude on February 25 kept the visitors engaged with visual art, music, performances, films and hands-on workshops at the Old GMC Complex. The festival reaffirmed its vision to create a space for Goa’s creative community to come together, exchange ideas, and showcase new work. Conceived as an artist-led initiative, the festival offered space for practitioners to present new work through both curated and independently developed projects.
The two special exhibitions: ‘Threads through time: textile art from Goa’, a group show highlighted the diverse traditional and contemporary textile artists in Goa. This was curated by Sitara Chowfla; and a new photography show. ‘Threads through time…’ focused on the textile art from the State of Goa – unfolding three layers. One was ‘Craft histories of Goa’ that showcased the Kunbi weaves of Goa with Poonam Pandit exhibiting the forgotten art, Bobbin lace art and handmade embroidery that women in Goa carried out in their homes. The other was ‘Contemporary textile explorations’ that saw fibre as a sculptural and conceptual medium. The third was ‘Textile and fashion in dialogue’ that considered garments and designs as tools for reinvention. Medha Khosla’s artistic weaves showcased in Linear Fragments’ what one can do with discarded fishing rope and nylon yarns. Afrah Shafiq mixed traditional crotchet and technology in her artwork.
‘What Remains: lens based work’ was conceived in collaboration with Gurgaon based MuseoCamera. The festival also featured a special exhibition by Christine Khonjie, an Iranian-French artist with deep roots in Goa, whose oeuvre multifaceted practice looks at themes of ancient history, mythology and shamanism. The main show featured works by Bhisaji Gadekar, Kaamna Patel, Mrinal Bahukhandi, Owl House Art collective and Ragini Deshpande.
This year the festival included three new programmes. The ‘LiveBox performance space’ was an immersive live-performance zone featuring theater, music, poetry. There was also ‘Queer Performance Art’. For children and young adults the festival had ‘SkatePark’ and ‘Children’s Pavilion’ where play, exploration, experimentation and art come together through workshops and activities.
The festival offered nine music acts featuring Goa-based artists including Goa Jazz Academy, JazzMaTazz, Lojal, and Mannequin Disorder and over 15 feature-length and short films that added another layer of storytelling to the festival experience. This edition was shaped by four curators: Nariyal Paani for Music, Anveer Mehta for the Skatepark, Sachin Chatte for Film, and Avril Stormy Unger for the Queer Programme.
Founded in 2019 by Prashant Panjiar, Gopika Chowfla, Sitara Chowfla, and Diptej Vernekar, this non-profit artist-led foundation aimed at offering a platform to bring artists, performers, filmmakers and thinkers to share work, exchange ideas and engage with the community. The founders believed that arts are essential to a healthy and vibrant society and worked to support creative practices across Goa through grants, exhibitions, mentorship, and public programmes. This flagship initiative has showcased Goa’s creative spirit while challenging clichés and highlighting the region’s evolving artistic landscape.
