by hemalMasood Sarwer
Artist Residency: Holi Hai! Artcore and FORMAT Festival International Residency.
Location: Gujrat, India
Artcore residency has been very crucial for me to navigate and cultivate my artistic expression. It has allowed me to collaborate, learn and express my visual language like never before. It allowed me to create a dialogue and challenge the established visual languages of art and self-expression.
Each day of the residency was very different from each other. During the residency I came to meet the tribal communities, artists and galleries. They shared their homes, their stories, and their knowledge of the art, landscape and their daily lives.
The artist residency enabled me to live and work outside of my usual environment which provided a unique opportunity to reflect on the surroundings and enabled me to produce new work with a different approach, challenging myself at every stage and transition.
The facilities were amazing, the surrounding landscape were breath-taking, and the two weeks of uninterrupted freedom resulted in an explosion of new work that have propelled my practice forward for the foreseeable future.
I experienced there is a place in myself that I will come back to again and again.
The residency wasn’t just for making new art—It taught me about reconsidering what I want to create, how I will do it, and why I am working in this manner. Simple questions can reveal imaginary blurred lines between self-exploration and artistic expression.
Working around others, with very different backgrounds have inspired my visual literacy. The residency has opened up new horizons and possibilities.
The residency allowed me to be vulnerable, experimental as well as self-reflective. It allowed me to extend my own practice, experiment, and “rethink the relationship” between artists, institutions, and society.