Driving along Panjim’s main street in December 2024, posters advertising an ongoing exposition of the relics of 16th-century missionary St. Francis Xavier mingled with signboards for the Serendipity Arts Festival. In its ninth year, Serendipity covered an incredible range of venues – repurposed government offices, beaches and parks, performing arts spaces and a massive open-air venue towards the southern end of the city. All these venues were expertly managed by an army of volunteers, many of them local college students. “You leave something you hate, or nafrat, here, and in return, you will receive parvah (an act of care),” one of them explained to me outside Nafrat/ Parvah, a project by Pollinator.io, where staff from a local salon offered hairstyling services to those who left a package of their hate by the door. In my two days at the festival, the salon was always full, just like the book massage room down the corridor, where slots to listen to recordings by ten authors while receiving a massage were filled hours in advance. Both projects were part of artist-duo Thukral and Tagra’s curatorial framework for the festival, Multiplay, which was described as a “sandbox for collective experiences” in a brochure circulated at the exhibition venue. Each year, Serendipity invites multiple curators to propose exhibitions and projects across several verticals, including visual arts, dance, theatre, music, food, craft and accessibility. Thukral and Tagra were the 2024 visual arts curators alongside Veeranganakumari Solanki.

Held at the Old Goa Medical College (GMC) complex on the banks of the Mandovi River, Multiplay summed up the spirit of the wider festival – of curiosity, care, play – and a deliberate splash of chaos. The exhibition featured 30 artists across 20 interactive projects, bringing audiences and artists together in its curation, and also community collaborators like the staff of the hair salon, and in other projects, like Rachna Toshniwal’s There is No Such Thing Called Waste, where fishing nets became a canvas for seaside debris, women from self-help groups in Navkhar, a coastal village in Maharashtra. With Ala Younis’ Friendship Garden: Playgrounds, as the days passed, sealed packages of white clay were moulded into fantastical scenes by audience members who signed up for workshops – their creations were displayed in neat rows across the room. In Shailesh BR’s Let’s Make a Choice (Swayamvara), the ritual motions of a Hindu wedding were revealed as absurd in their mechanised forms; visitors queued up to let a motorised contraption throw rice at them, delighting in the incongruity of the gesture in the exhibition setting. In the guise of play, grim realities sometimes made for striking Instagram backdrops. In a tiny room by the entrance to the space, Gurdeep Dhaliwal’s low-hanging thicket of cotton plants loomed over viewers who sat down to watch interviews with farmers who enumerated the harsh realities of working in agriculture – more frequently, visitors stopped to photograph themselves in this artificial grove, wrapping tiny swabs of cotton around bristly brown stems to compose the perfect frame.

On Caranzalem Beach, locals taking late-evening beach strolls occasionally stopped to watch Indonesian dancer Agung Gunawan in the site-specific performance Littoral States of Being, curated by choreographer and dancer Preethi Athreya. Gunawan moved through an intricate mass of painted reeds and figurines created by folk dramatist Siva Murugan. Viewed from a distance, Gunawan was a small and solitary figure, occasionally swallowed up by mounds of sand that were painstakingly reconstituted every day after high tide passed. In one charged moment, he clambered up one of the reeds, sending ripples of movement through the entire installation with each weight shift. The family of three seated next to me avidly recorded Gunawan on a phone camera, the camera’s gaze intermittently shifting from his body to the visual and technical design by Pravin Kannanur, with beams of coloured light arcing across the sand.

The focus on experiential programming intersected with more conventional exhibition and performance presentations. One morning, I filed into a makeshift black box space in the Old GMC Complex to watch Anoushka Zaveri’s Glitch in the Myth, where the actor-dancer turned the Ramayana on its head to prioritise Sita’s narrative, orchestrating unlikely collaborations between Sita and her traditional antagonists – the queen Kaikeyi, the demon king Ravana and his sister Surpanakha – to propose a universal sisterhood, where Sita, desperate for meaning and adventure, would find what she sought. Working with the Ramayana, which has charged religious and political meanings in contemporary India, Zaveri started her performance with a message for the local police – if they had objections to her work, they could arrest her – but after the performance ended. Elsewhere, Bhupen in Goa at the Directorate of Accounts presented a huge collection of artist Bhupen Khakhar’s work from the Swaraj Art Archive. Curated by Khakhar’s friend and fellow artist Gulammohammed Sheikh, the exhibition offered a window into the artist’s practice and working conditions. Early in his career, Khakhar worked as a part-time accountant in Baroda. Banal scenes from daily life are spotlighted in his work. In a sparse rendering of a tailor’s shop, two men work on sewing machines, their measuring tapes strung around their necks; in the top half of the painting, the words ‘DE-LUXE’ fill the frame, underlined by a row of buttoned-up shirts. Geographies of Yourself at the Excise Building next door, a special project with German gallery neugerriemschneider, brought big-name works to the fray, including Ai Weiwei’s massive Lego recreation of Monet’s Water Lilies, protectively cordoned off, the distance between the work and the viewer dissuading you from an appreciation of its detail (it is made up of 6,50,000 Lego bricks).

Over the years, Serendipity has embedded itself into the local imagination – working to build and deliver an arts festival in non-traditional venues, connected more by geography than by function. School groups, often seen marching through exhibition spaces in single file with just enough time to glance at the works on display, thronged exhibitions and projects across the festival. In a food court, a living statue wearing gold face paint posed next to an ice cream stall. The challenge of creating an arts infrastructure across such spaces for an eight-day festival can situate practice in new locations while creating logistical dilemmas. The festival is free to attend, and that invites broad participation. In the warren of rooms that Multiplay used at the Old GMC Complex, visitors encountered a range of interactive possibilities, often battling crowds to engage with the artworks. Too many visitors, however, is perhaps a good problem to have as an arts festival.