No full stops to festivals: Upcoming art fest to transform Kolkata into a live art gallery

New Delhi, Jan 12 (IANS) Even as the winter calendar -- between December and late February -- is marked with numerous events themed around arts and literature, there seems to be no full stops to what waits ahead for art lovers as the just announced second edition of CIMA Awards - Kolkata Art Festival is all set to transform the City of Joy into a live art gallery.

The month-long festival begins from February 4 and will continue till March 4 at various venues across Kolkata. Making the announcements in the Capital on Wednesday were noted personalities from the arts sphere, Rakhi Sarkar and Dr Alka Pande, who are the Project Directors of the festival.

The second edition of the festival has been designed as a biennial event in search of country-wide talent in the visual arts, the Project Directors said. Initiated and supported by Art and Heritage Foundation (AHF), a non-profit body and partnered by CIMA (Centre of International Modern Art), the project was launched in 2015.

The awards have been designed to discover genuine talent in India, especially beyond the cities. It seeks to bridge the gap between urban and semi-urban India, promoting the varied richness of Indian arts as a whole, the Project Directors said.

There will be around around 20 awardees in eight categories. Of them, there will be one oveall winner who will get Rs 5 lakhs, a trophy and a solo show; the second prize winner will get Rs 3 lakhs and the third prize winnner will get Rs 2 lakhs. The other awardees will receive between Rs 1 lakh and Rs 25,000 each depending on their category.

The keynote address on "Transmedial Trajectories" will be delivered by Dr. Chris Dercon, Former Director, Tate Modern, intendant of Volksbuhne, Berlin.

In this edition, the project has been expanded to include allied creative disciplines and activities, including design, architecture, cinema, performance art, symposia, talks, conversations and workshops through various collateral projects in collaboration with leading universities, agencies and institutions from across the world, providing a holistic experience and overview of the arts.

"CIMA Awards has been designed as one of the most definitive and exciting events on Indian visual arts. It is an award-centric project, aiming to reward and promote excellence and enhance creative freedom. Through a rigorously curated International Symposium, Connecting Histories, the project tries to reinvent the tradition of dialectics so fundamental to our civilisation.

The current edition has been significantly expanded to include multi-disciplines through over 30 collateral partners. The festival aspires to provide a holistic overview of contemporary visual language in context to other creative disciplines likes cinema, theatre, music, architecture and design. In its entirety, CIMA Awards - Kolkata Art Festival 2017 will provide an incredible experience from the heart of an incredible city; a 'must see' for the art cognoscenti of Indi"," Sarkar said.

The festival will also host collateral events with leading art galleries in the city and will include an iconic exhibition on Migrations with the Goethe Institute. Local cultural institutions like Chitraban and IIT will also be seen in collaboration for this magnum event.

Speaking about the concurrent international and national art symposium around the theme of 'Connecting Histories', Pande sa"d: "The addition of the International Symposium to the second edition of CIMA Awards in February 2017 is a well thought component to expand the theoretical discourse to the CIMA awards. Scholars from India and abroad will investigate the historical processes which underpin the visual narrative of art practice in India. The cultural diversity and plural culture of the land is embedded with many layers of the complex thought which emanates through time and space. Text and image remain entwined creating systems of "rt."