Chila Kumari Singh Burman, Dad’s Ice Cream Van, 2020. Courtesy Chila Kumari Singh Burman

Jodhpur Arts Week, which launches its Edition 1.0 next month, is a contemporary art festival as well as an exploration of authorship, memory and place. While the upcoming edition, which runs October 1-7, is ostensibly the first, it builds on last year’s Special Projects Edition, which, in a successful proof of concept, drew a crowd of 45,000 to Rajasthan’s Blue City. Having tapped curators Tapiwa Matsinde and Sakhshi Mahajan to helm this year’s festival, the Public Arts Trust of India (founded by philanthropist and collector Sana Rezwan) is now looking to create something more enduring: a model of cultural programming that proactively contextualizes contemporary practice through convergence with the living local heritage.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

Many of the international artists and designers who trekked to the edge of the Thar Desert for Jodhpur Arts Week have been working with the city’s master weavers, embroiderers, metalworkers and woodcarvers. The result is a collision of ancestral skill and contemporary gesture, where community members are co-authors. The title of this year’s curatorial exhibition—“Hath Ro Hunar,” or “skill of the hand” in Marwari—is apt, as the festival positions artisan knowledge not as peripheral to contemporary art but as foundational to it.

Indeed, Jodhpur Arts Week stands out among the many art weeks around the globe in its rejection of the hierarchy that too often denigrates traditional art forms as craft, somehow separate from what we deem fine art. This is a festival that breaks down silos, melding experimental practice with heritage technique and encouraging visiting artists and Jodhpur’s craftspeople to engage with each other as peers.

This year’s visiting artists and designers include Awdhesh Tamrakar, Aku Zeliang, Gaspard Combes, Anitha N. Reddy, Theo Pinto, Zavier Wong Zhen Rui, Chila Kumari Singh Burman and the Raqs Media Collective. Each will produce site-specific installations that live and breathe the textures of the city,........

© Observer