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On 17 December, the young Goan artist Bhisaji Gadekar walked slowly through the large-scale group exhibition of his peers on display at the beautifully reconstructed Bento Miguel building in Panjim’s picturesque ward of Sao Tome, next to the old Patto bridge. Over 30 artists are represented, from Panjim’s own Theodore Mariano Mesquita and Harshada Kerkar to the seniormost tier of the state’s cultural heritage, nonagenarian Laxman Pai, still-fiery Vamona Navelcar, and “Sir” Sadguru Chendvankar. Gadekar absorbed the imagery of his fellow artists, as well as the ambience of the gorgeous Latinate neighborhoods visible through the windows and balconies on one side (the Mandovi flows slowly on the other) and made his way to a white-walled area where he settled in for the next three days. He unpacked sacks of clods of mud, then spent considerable time crushing them into fine dust, which turned into clay that he layered throughout the space, with something like a lingam in the centre, and quotations by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, and Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali daubed on the walls. All this was spontaneous, unplanned and exhilarating for the small crowds that assembled to watch Gadekar. As the curator of ‘NOW YOU SEE IT: The Invisible River of Konkani Surrealism’, I too did not know quite what to expect, which makes these moments of transcendence so precious. Many such highlights occurred in the process of compiling this highly unusual group exhibition featuring almost 200 artworks in an extraordinary multiplicity of mediums from Gadekar’s performance to projection and video, as well as painting and sculpture. There is no doubt this year’s Serendipity Arts Festival brought some marvellous exhibitions to the state, which rank among the highlights of the year. But the Goan art exhibition that will remain on display at Bento Miguel into the second week of January is one-of-a-kind. Nothing like it has happened since Ranjit Hoskote’s monumental ‘Aparanta: The Confluence of Modern and Contemporary Art in Goa’ conclusively established there is a “family resemblance” that connects the great Goan artists of the past 150 years to the host of “meteorically brilliant” exemplars working today. This idea of family extended to my own curatorial decision to lean strongly to inclusion of a number of artists who do not usually number amongst “ big names” recognized by the insecure, brand-obsessed Indian art world. Thus, the Konkani Surrealism artists span across generations from grandparents to twentysomethings, as well as others who have become assimilated via marriage or migration. As Amitav Ghosh said (and is quoted on the wall at the exhibition), Goa “has invented a kind of cosmopolitanism that is peculiarly its own. It is a cosmopolitanism of lived experience; a cosmopolitanism of inner dialogues, where the outsider becomes part of an inner voice.” The artworks collected at Bento Miguel include many that should be seen by every Goan. There is Shilpa Mayenkar Naik’s lovely installation about shards, where she has painstakingly recreated what colonial-era porcelain must have looked like from pieces she picked up in Old Goa. Crowds gather daily in front of Loretti Pinto’s subtle, very beautiful meditations about globalization, change and loss. Another favourite is Sandesh Naik’s ‘Gaurnica’, a turbulent large-scale painting about what Goa is undergoing in the throes of tourism, casino and real estate development overload (titled in tribute to Picasso’s ‘Guernica’.) All this related to “Konkani Surrealism”. This term is not a curatorial imposition, but rather a carefully considered analysis of what the artists of Goa have produced ensemble, in this generation as well as previously. Here it is relevant to recall the Nobel Prize winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s consistent avowals that his famous “magical realism” was not much more than a faithful rendition of his life in Caribbean Colombia. In the same way, it has been obvious for a very long time that even mundane Goan reality – more or less faithfully rendered in art, architecture, even music and food – confounds those who tend to think in binaries. This has happened several times in the Konkani Surrealism exhibition the past few days. At one point a small knot of people found it impossible to understand another painting by Sandesh Naik, where the pieta (an image of Jesus being cradled by Mary after his death on the cross) also includes a portrayal of Yama, the Hindu lord of death. Is he a convert, they wanted to know. What is his religion, they insisted on finding out. “My religion is Goan,” said Naik.