VeeranganaKumari Solanki
A floating exhibition titled ‘Barge’ will anchor at the Captain of Ports Jetty in Old Goa from December 12 converting the familiar industrial vessel, which has been integral to the State's economy for decades since Goa's liberation. Goa's iconic ore barges ferrying iron ore cargoes, will turn into an unlikely stage for art at the Serendipity.
Curated by Veeranganakumari Solanki, who co-directs the SqW:Lab Foundation and sits on the advisory committee of the Piramal Photography Gallery at National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai, the key component of the exhibition is the evolving sound work being developed by artist Alan Rego, who taps into the barge's acoustic behaviour.
Alan collected sounds from the barge and he’s planning to put a microphone into the water while he’s performing. The microphone will gather noise that is processed in real time. The artist uses a programme to break the noise into frequencies, then shapes these into patterns that evolve into rhythm and eventually music.
For curator Solanki, this process mirrors the exhibition’s core idea that presence can emerge from absence, rhythm from randomness and meaning from what first appears incoherent. The exhibition is built on ideas from three earlier SAF projects: Future Landing, which explored speculative environments; Synaesthetic Notations, which examined cross-sensory translation; and A Haptic Score, which focused on touch-based perception. Each of these projects looked at how the body receives and interprets sensory information, a line of inquiry that continues aboard the barge.
The barge’s hollow architecture becomes the starting point. "A barge holds a cavity, a space and an absence for presence to exist. In functional form, these presences may be perceivable matter, or traces of an echo. Either way, it is only through absence that presence comes to be, whether material or abstract. Yet, there is a third aspect: imagination. Imagination, driven by an encounter, emerges from a gap that exists at the threshold of what we do and do not perceive. It invites potentiality," Solanki said.
Artists on board, namely Prajakta Potnis, Hemant Sreekumar and Julien Segard, respond to this idea of absence and presence through the space of the barge itself, working with its architecture and its sound.
