Back to square one

An 80-year-old Art Deco home in Colaba will play host to 10 international artists as part of a creative fellowship

Back to square one

Squareworks Laboratory is a unique fellowship program where a domestic space is transformed into a creative one. Pics/Suresh Karkera

Artists gather by the open kitchen

A layered approach
The inaugural fellows hail from six countries — India, Japan, Hong Kong, United Kingdom, United States, and Brazil. The three-month course begins with workshops being conducted for the first 10 days. Levine tells us that the objective is to familiarise themselves with each other's practices. "We'll then proceed to do a series of collaborative play projects. For instance, Vishwa and I love postal art, so we're going to do a series of postcards. And over the next three months we hope to have exhibitions of some of the output, and see how much our work has changed," she says — her words in stark contrast to the public perception of an artist working in isolation.

Katsushi Goto and Vishwa Shroff

The Mumbai connect
One of the fellows is noted city artist Sameer Kulavoor, who came on board after the team scouted through fourteen studios in Mumbai. "He gave us a guided tour, which for a curator is a very special thing. Coming from London, there's a lot of grey art happening, but in India, there is something about the sunshine. That's a change of perspective," Levine shares, with Kulavoor adding that as a Mumbaikar, the initiative is a starting point even for him. "I have never been a part of something like this in 35 years. And you somewhat become desensitised towards your city, so for me this was an opportunity to know better. We recently did a walk with Alisha Sadikot around Mazgaon where I'm based and I learnt things I didn't know about."

(From left) Charlie Levine, Sameer Kulavoor, and Katsushi Goto

Organic twist
The only evidence of time passing through our conversation with the four artists, is when the door opens again, and the other six fellows enter in quick succession. Some are yet to recover from a jet lag but it's still hard to miss the camaraderie in the kitchen. Levine recalls the first day. "The kitchen is the heart of any home and what's amazing is that on the first day we all naturally just started to surround it and started conversing." Taps are left running, the cups are out, and its perhaps time for coffee and for creative inspiration to strike.

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