Artist Spotlight

The Chennai Photography biennale returns with a contemplative third edition in a hybrid format that reflects upon our current social exigencies. This year's theme 'Maps of Disquiet' offers a possibility of rethinking our futures through broader parameters that address the complexity of the disquiet that we are experiencing in recent years.

The biennale is an opportunity to promote a networking atmosphere for international, national and local artists and curators. This is the last weekend to attend the festival in person – visit any of the primary venues today or watch the visual presentation online

#FestivalsForFuture #CuratingConversations #FestivalConnects #FestivalsFromIndia #FindYourFestival#CPB #ChennailPhotographyBiennale #PhotographyFestival #BritishCouncil #CultureConnectsUs

BBC Interview

Spoke to BBC The Cultural Frontline on Art in India's 75th year of independence along with fascinating contemporary writers, performers, and artists:

Artist Amitesh Grover and playwright Purva Naresh create art that challenges their audience to think and Indian society to confront uncomfortable truths. They share what inspires them and what they see as the threats to freedom of expression in India today. Writer Annie Zaidi talks about her new book, City of Incident, and the uncertain position of vocal, visible women in contemporary India. Author and historian Aanchal Malhotra gives a tour of Delhi's Old Fort, or Purana Qila, searching for traces or commemoration of the huge refugee camp for Muslims there in 1947. And celebrated folk singer Malini Awasthi reveals the art that changed her life and set her on a mission to ensure that traditional songs, culture and languages survive as India evolves.

Presenter: Anu Anand | Producer: Paul Waters

NYU Tisch School of the Arts

In-person, virtual, masked-up: New kind of class photo after my session with graduate students of art and theatre, NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

The Last Poet goes to Theatre Biennale, Canada

The Last Poet - a work of cyber theatre that I premiered last year - has been selected for the prestigious theatre biennale in Canada. They officially launched the program in an online event today. Our show is amongst performances from Chile, Australia, Tunisia, Montreal, Toronto, and others, featuring artists from multiple and diverse backgrounds. Congratulations to the lovely team of The Last Poet and much gratitude to the Artistic Director @pampatel and her stellar team at MT Space that runs the biennale. They have a tremendous line up coming up this year, will post links to the bookings soon.

Talk at University at Calicut, Drama School

Talking to students of performance/theatre in Kerala tonight — they are a fabulous group to speak with.

Press mentions my poetry-texts on Instagram

Someone brought to my notice that my writings on Instagram got featured today in The Week. Don’t know the person who wrote about it, but if you are out here reading this, I owe you coffee.

Talk at Christ University, India

Today, tune in for my talk @ 5pm, where I speak with MA students (English and Cultural Studies) at Christ University on Techno-Cultures and my recent work.

Talk at DSM, Mumbai

As the world continues to battle coronavirus and theatre practitioners engage with the idea of what theatre is and can be, creators Amitesh Grover and Benjamin Samuels have been pushing the boundaries of the form and creating interdisciplinary work for a long time. At a recent Unrehearsed Futures conversation, they shared their foray into using technology as a crucial element of the work they create, art as a social practice and more.

Find the summary and the recording of the talk here - https://dramaschoolmumbai.in/unrehearsed-futures-season-2-episode-4/

LASALLE COLLEGE OF ARTS, SINGAPORE

Delighted to be presenting the opening keynote for LASALLE College of the Arts (Singapore) moderated by the inimitable Venka Purushothaman (Provost, LASALLE), an award-winning art writer and academic with a distinguished career in the arts and creative industries in Singapore.

‘Practising art that imagines new collectives poses a peculiar challenge in a time when constitutional certainties are pulverised. How do we imagine art as a collectivising force when dissent faces threats around the world? How do we resist new collectivising forces in a world of dizzying biennales, shape-shifting art fairs, migrating museum heads, defunct culture ministries, and private capital? Are values of bonding, locality, and commitment still valid? Through my recent works, I will discuss the idea of imagining ‘relational-collectives’, those that get formed through acts of invitation, volunteering, casting, signing contracts, ones that alter social temporalities, ones that insist on creating alternate relations.’

http://ancerconference2020.sg/community/#/agenda

Absent Bodies

What does performance mean when it occurs in absentia: when the performers are missing? I will share my works which lie at the intersection of Theatre, Performance, and Interactive Art, and point towards ephemeral grounds of knowledge like grief, sleep, care, and work. The talk will explore the immaterial conditions of our bodies and highlight the claims of performance in our times..

Date: 30 May 2020 | 6 pm | Live on Facebook | STEM Dance Kampni

Theatre Outreach and Pedagogy

For those of you interested in debates and ideas surrounding theatre and performance training, I open up questions about content, syllabus, and teaching methodologies in my talk today as part of NSD webinar series - Theatre Outreach and Pedagogy

BODYSCAPE interviews Amitesh Grover

Amitesh Grover talks about the philosophical understanding of the medium performance in relation to his experiences, also stimulatingly talks about the parameter between Performing Art and Performance Art, how that’s become a blur in the process, in his practices, within the body etc. This conversation was moderated by Anupam Saikia.

Curating Theatre: There Will Be Trouble

My new essay on theatre curation is published here, in which I discuss the role that theatre festivals can play in our crisis ridden times -

‘A theatre festival is in public space, but it is also as public space. Theatre festivals are good at creating specific densities of narratorial complexities. They accelerate, interrupt, exhaust, and enthuse communities. They alter social temporalities. In a world in which space for disagreement and dissent has begun to erode from society, festival-making could become a restorative act. It could return the public to the realm of imagination, to freedoms, to processes and to experiences that are being expelled from society. Festival-making could be a process of offering protection, attention, and amplification to voices, identities, and silences under threat outside. In this sense, festival-making is public-making; it reserves the power to conjure publics pushed out of sight, it can take up the tumult that seethes under state or social censor and give itself the mandate to create trouble‘.

Hakara Journal Online

TOWN HALL

TOWN HALL is organised by curator & writer Premjish Achari as an open online event in response to the widespread anxiety in the arts community amidst Covid-19. Invited panelists will discuss how to come together and support each other in the arts, how to assess the crisis, and how to explore various models to associate, collaborate and practice art-making. Date: May 10, 2020. 4pm onwards -

Panel:
Amitesh Grover, Artist and Curator
Avni Sethi, Interdisciplinary Practitioner and Founder, Conflictorium 
Ayesha Singh, Artist and Co-Founder Art Chain India
Ravi Agarwal, Artist, Environmental Campaigner and Curator 
Manuela Ciotti, Anthropologist 
Nyambura M. Waruingi, Founder and Creative Director, AKOIA & Company
Premjish Achari, Curator 
Leenika Jacob, Managing Trustee, The Kala Chaupal Trust
Sandeep Hota, Project Manager, Bhubaneswar Art Trail

The Homework Club (Australia)

Shakthidharan Sivanathan and Nithya Nagarajan invited me to facilitate the very first session of their newly forming and simultaneously evolving sharing economy for South Asian artists in Australia, The Homework Club, today. I hosted a session with 12 brown artists/arts workers on radical ways of interrupting. We spoke about how erasure is easy for people who occupy positions of power. Erasure has a politics and a history of violence. I shared a few of my digital art projects and interventions pre COVID-19: Crowd Condo I, II and III and Sleep I, II and III, and then discussed different ways to understand what is 'artist's time' amidst a pandemic. Is performing for audiences online a substitute for conventional theatre? Or are we asking the wrong question? Online performances can be dispersed not concentrated, distributed not centralised, de-authored yet scripted, collective and intimate. The digital medium can make us look for new ways to think about what it means to practice theatre. Delighted to forge this new connection.

SAF Online Talks

Date - 30 April, 2020 | 3pm onwards
Performing The Real in Times of The Pandemic - Theatre makers Kai Tuchmann, Anuja Ghosalkar, and Amitesh Grover will discuss how as artists, we face the reality of Covid 19. Each of them will present a short iteration rooted in their practice. After which in a moderated conversation with Arushi, the panelists will explore the pressing and immediate questions––What do contemporary performances in the age of the virus look like? What are the protocols and ethics involved in making work about Covid-19 currently? What does it mean to performance making, now that it cannot be embodied? What are new imaginations of survival that one needs? Serendipity Arts Festival 
Zoom link -  https://zoom.us/j/95634799908

Radio

I will be in conversation with artists from Athen, New York, and Stuttgart on RADIO RAMPE, a public radio hosted by Montage and Theater Rampe at midnight tonight. Listen in here - https://mixlr.com/theater-rampe/ 
Thank you Aliki Schaefer for the invitation!

100 Velocity Pieces (Special)

This International Women's Day, colleagues at Max Mueller Bhavan / Goethe Insitut come together to show that an equal world is an enabled world. They are proud of the fact that women are so strongly represented at their organisationi and contribute significantly towards gender equality. Kudos, team. Behind is a special iteration, a verse for today, shared on the billboard behind - 100 Velocity Pieces, a project by Amitesh Grover, an #Actant for Five Million Incidents.

Talk on Theatre Curation

At the ongoing International Theatre Festival - Bharangam - I spoke about how we might curate performance festivals today, talking about why, given the escalating tension between art and contemporary society, we must expect that 'there's going to be some trouble', and perhaps even begin to think about the task of how to curate 'trouble and art' as inseparable festival twins.

ITFOK 2020 Curation Talk

‘Theatres of Migration and Citizenship’ with incredible artists Inua Ellams (Nigeria/Britain), Jacob Boehme (Australia), Lars Oyno (Norway) at The International Theatre Festival of Kerala.