Bengaluru Artist Residency One (BAR1) is a non-profit programme set up and run by a collective of visual artists from Bangalore. The main objective of this programme has been to foster the local, Indian and international exchange of ideas experiences through hosting guest residencies. Over the years the residency has also organised wokshops with other institutions like art collages and student bodies.

This grant enables BAR1 to host a three-month India-India residency programme for emerging Indian artists from an extended fiels of art practice. The programme will nurture individual artistic practice through collective exchange.

Beginning on July 1, 2008, the Bar1 residency will host six Indian artists from across the country concerned with pursuing form-based experiments that extend the boundaries of their practice and that of the field. Artists will be chosen from diverse cultural backgrounds and regions in India, so as to facilitate greater interaction and exchange. They will be encouraged to explore and draw upon Bangalore city and its different institutions. For instance, the artists could look at the city's science institutions, information technology, alternatine schooling, Kannada culture, landscapes, environment, and so on. The selection of the final artist residency will be made by a panel comprising the organising commitee, appointed staff of IFA and one external jury member from the arts or curatorial practice. BAR1 has appointed a facilitator/ coordinator to look after the artists' logistical and other requiements.

The residency has been imagined as a playful laboratory, as it were, and will include salons that offer the artists regular critique and feedback, and a closing public event or finissage, where they can share their work in progress. However important the interdisciplinary impetus for collaboration and cultural exchange may be, the collective feels that the artists should have the freedom to develop thier work at their own place and interpret the residency from their own perspective. Rather that a theme-based way of bringing artists together, BAR1 believes that a theme, if any, should come from the participants themselves. The residency, therefore, will evolve, take its own shape and be as flexible as the residents want it to be. To that effect, BAR1 will try and curate a group that will inspire wide, diverse and constructive exchange of ideas without any pressure to exhibit or produce finished work at the end of the residency. The regular salons will be documented with the intent of publishing, at a later stage, interesting dilouges between the residents, cultural practitioners and other artists.  

 

This description is part of the institutional records created by IFA at the onset of the grant. The project may have changed in due course as reflected in the deliverables from the Grantee.