Theme 1: Reimagining festivals for the future
Antibodies
Explore the realm of live art in a unique 24-hour performance festival with HH Art Spaces, India and The Tetley, UK in Goa! Spread over a year, the project is bringing together a diverse range of cultural practitioners from the UK and India to rethink the body and the border, in its immediate ecology and the extended realms of myth, magic, science and healing in the context of Live Art. This October, Hyundai Tate Research Centre, London hosted a seminar where leading performance artists from South Asia such as Sandev Handy, Salima Hashmi, Yasmin Jahan Nupur and Jagath Weerasinghe and from the UK like Alessio Antoniolli, Huma Mujli deliberated on the long histories of live art and protests.
In March, a residency will bring together artists from India and UK to Goa and will culminate in a live and virtual 24-hour performance marathon with cutting edge performances and an exhibition, curated by HH Art Spaces, Goa and The Tetley, Leeds.
18-19 March 2022
Goa, India
Click here for more information.
Delhi to Derry: Together in Sound
Welcome Fully Automatic Model from Northern Ireland for a collaborative set with EDM artist Kaleekarma from India at Magnetic Fields this December. The first of many performances that will feature eight talented EDM artists from Northern Ireland in India, this project between boxout.fm, India and Celtronic Festival, Northern Ireland has already toured eight emerging DJs from India to the Celtronic Festival in Derry earlier this and you can learn more about their sonic experiences here.
Stream the original new collaborative single ‘Delhi Birds’ coming out of this project that put Stain, together with UK underground music legend Zed Bias. Experience the magical blend of Indian percussion with classic UK dub and bass flair and watch out the India/UK Together events section for more gigs!
July 2022: Derry, Northern Ireland
November – December 2022: Across multiple cities in India
Click here for more information.
Future Fantastic
Journey into the future with FutureFantastic, and immerse yourself in the wonderous artworks that address climate emergency using new age tools of Aritificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality. BeFantastic, Jaaga in Bangaore and FutureEverything in Manchester have commissioned a series of international fellowships between emerging and seasoned artists and technologists focusing on the themes of climate action blending gaming, generative art with more traditional art forms like improv theatre! Mentored by experts in the field, the fellows will be creating new interactive works of both installations and performances that will premiere at the festival taking place in Bengaluru.
Get a chance to discover artists that are pushing the boundaries of TechArt, be a part of cutting-edge conversations and workshops with experts in the domain all at one fantastic festival!
January 2023
Manchester, UK
March 2023
Bengaluru, India
Click here for more details on the festival.
Govandi Arts Festival
Join a spectacular procession of lanternsin the streets of Govandi as the community celebrates a year of arts development facilitated by Community Design Agency (CDA) from Mumbai.
CDA has been working with the marginalised neighbourhood of this Mumbai subrub and with British Council support, they have partnered with Streets Reimagined and Lamplighter Arts from Bristol, UK who bring their shared practice of using arts to inspire placemaking and bring communities together. CDA has been working with the youth of Govandi across the genres of Theatre, Film, Photography, Public Art and Rap. Lamplighters Arts will be working with the community and build their iconic lanterns parade in India for the first time at the Govandi Arts Festival. The festival will also premiere new art commisiosns and teh projects from the mentorship programme. The illuminated procession will return to Bristol in March. Take a peek at how the festival is shaping up here.
15-19 February 2023
Mumbai, India
March 2023
Bristol, UK
Click here for more information.
RhythmXchange
Enjoy a cross-cultural music festival curated by young people, with a focus on vocal percussion traditions including beatboxing and Konnakol! A new collaborative project that seeks to explore rhythm as a shared language between East and West, RhythmXchange the festival brings together Manchester Museum and the Indian Music Experience Museum, Bengaluru. Through experimentation and exchange, four young people with musical skills from India and the UK have been a part of an exciting mentored artistic development programme over six months leading to a percussion-based art project and 3 day festival.
India Festival | India Music Experience Museum | 25-27 November
Manchester Festival | Manchester Museum | 17-19 March 2023
Click here for more information.
Ziro Focus Metaverse
A virtual world of music and an intriguing experience of NFTs and Virtual Reality set against scenic India-UK backgrounds. An international collaborative festival between Ziro Festival of Music, India and Focus Wales, North Wales took place from May to October 2022.
The Digital project by Ziro Festival of Music and Focus Wales will feature artists from Focus Wales and Mangka from Manipur on a digital platform and on-ground at the counterpart festivals. A second phase includes a VR platform to connect around NFT and crypto-currency, offering a new window to creative communities geared towards Indian and Welsh multidisciplinary artists and musicians
Click here for more information.
Theme 2: The global opportunity of India’s multilingual literature
International Mother Language day
As part of our ongoing ‘India/UK Together Season of Culture’, it is our pleasure to invite you to this event to mark the International Mother Language Day.
Through a moderated panel discussion, we will explore the interplay of cultural understanding and linguistic diversity while raising awareness and support for endangered languages and language education. The panellists will also be interacting with guests, followed by an audio-visual live performance featuring musicians from the Biate tribe of Assam in collaboration with Vinayak^a.
Tuesday 21 February, 7 p.m.
Venue: British Council, 17 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi
International Publishing Fellowship 2022
A collaboration between British Council and the ArtX Company, the Fellowship is a peer-to-peer mentoring and professional development programme where publishers from the UK are matched with publishers of similar career stage and publishing interests from India. This year-long programme consists of reciprocal study trips, featured masterclasses, networking opportunities and professional skill building. Meet the fellows here.
November 2022
UK - Edinburgh Newcastle, Sunderland and London
January 2023
India
Language is a Queer Thing
Reflect on the relationship between language and queerness with a poetry exchange that pairs three queer UK poets with three queer Indian poets brought to you by The Queer Muslim Project, India, Verve Poetry Festival, UK and BBC's Contains Strong Language in Birmingham. Discover new work produced collaboratively by the poets with this anthology and listen to a fabulous podcast that crosses borders and genders.
Meet the poets in person at Tata Lit Live on 13 November!
Click here for more information.
PEN Translates
A project by English PEN to support Indian literature in translation and develop infrastructure for translators working with UK publishers. The project enables Indian UK publishers to acquire more work in translation to English from different Indian languages and showcases writers from across India including Dalit writers at a series of festivals in India and the UK.
December 2022 - February 2023
UK
Write Assamese
A collaboration between BEE Books, India and Untold, UK to promote Indian literature in translation. The project focuses on new, unpublished Assamese writers and those writing in Assamese in Northeast India. A unique project that aims to carve out a space for consistent, quality translations emerging from Assam to generate new fiction for international audiences.
Theme 3: Science, arts and heritage in times of change
Concert for Friendship
Concert for Friendship is a collaboration between the British Council and KM Music Conservatory to celebrate the ability of music in cultivating friendship. A part of the India/UK Together Season of Culture, the concert features young artists from different countries in one symphonic performance — The AR Rahman Foundation’s Sunshine Orchestra, Sistema Scotland’s Big Noise and KM Music Conservatory. The 100 musicians on stage, most aged between 8–20, will spend a week working together before the concert. Featuring popular works by Puccini, Verdi, Grieg and Beethoven, there will also be Scottish melodies, Naga and Tamil folk songs and Carnatic melodies — all by the orchestra and choir! The concert will also feature soprano Divya Iyer and a world premier of Malabar, composed and performed by guitarist Matt Bacon.
Saturday, 4 March 2023, 7:30pm
Venue: Sir Mutha Venkatasubba Rao Concert Hall, 7, Shenstone Park, # 13, 1, Harrington Rd, Chetpet, Chennai
Communities of Choice
Experience the expressions of emerging artists from India and Wales examining identity and inclusion using lens-based artworks of image, word, and film. An invitation to rethink our notions of identity, community, collective responsibility and care, the exhibition is a collaboration between Chennai Photo Biennale Foundation, India and Ffotogallery, Wales. The exhibition will be showcased at Kochi- Muziris Biennale and free for all to attend.
12 December 2022 – 10 April 2023
Kochi, India
Click here for more information.
Early Photography and Archaeology in Western India
Get a chance to view for the first time some of the rarest, earliest, and most striking photographs and objects of India’s rich archaeological heritage, complemented by photographs by contemporary Indian photographers that help bridge the past, present, and future.
A collaboration between Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), Mumbai and British Library, the exhibition will bring to public attention the history of exploration and documentation, when major monuments and archaeological sites were photographed for the very first time by European and Indian archaeologists between 1855 and 1900.
Curated by John Falconer of British Library and Vaidehi Sanyal os CSMVS, the exhibition will illustrate some of the most historically significant sites in western India including Ajanta and other rock-cut sites, Hampi, Aihole, Satrunjaya, Bijapur, etc.
A number of new comparative photographs by young photographers from India of the present state and setting of these historical monuments and sites will invite you to reflect on issues of protection of heritage sites, challenges and conservation needs. Join audio tours, heritage walks and inspiring talks and workshops at the museum to know more about archival photography and archaeological developments!
25 November 2022 – 26 February 2023
CSMVS, Mumbai, India
Complementing this showcase, British Library is hosting Hampi: Photography and Archaeology in southern India, showcasing photographs, taken between 1857 and 1970 that capture the archaeological site of Hampi.
25 September 2022 – 26 February 2023
Open to all, British Library, Lonodn
Elsewhere in India
Lose yourself in the wonderous live transmedia performance that combines game engine technology with incredible art alongside a genre-bending palate of Carnatic-electronic music. Featuring digital human avatars of pioneering Indian audio-visual artists Murthovic (MSR Murthy) and Thiruda (Avinash Kumar) and developed by Antariksha Studio in collaboration with Crossover Labs, UK.
The premiere at Magnetic Fields will follow Meenakshi, a fictional, out-of-work cultural cyborg in the year 2079. Join the immersive extravaganza as her chance meeting with Murthovic and Thiruda thrusts the trio into an adventure of self-discovery and space exploration.
Tickets available at magneticfields.in
Future Flow
Feast your eyes on a celebration of prints that take inspiration from Castle Mills, the current home of Edinburgh Printmakers who have collaborated with Flow India for the project. The exhibition will retrace Scotland and India’s past industrial relationship and re-present it in the form of a future facing print exhibition commissioned and produced by next generation visual arts curators able to see things in new ways.
The project has worked with National Institute of Design, India, Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh College of Art, and Queen Margaret University to establish a cohort of young fellows and artists and printmakers from Scotland and India to co-create the exhibition.
Read about the evolution of the project. Exhibition dates to be announced soon.
Vaccines: Injecting Hope
Explore how vaccines are developed at pandemic speed in this exhibition by the National Council of Science Museums, India and the Science Museum Group, UK. The exhibition funded by the Wellcome Trust. Taking themes of resilience, endurance and personal stories, an Indian sculptor based in Delhi, Sushank Kumar, playwright Sudah Bhuchar, Tony Pickering Animator and Nigel Townsend Creative Producer in London have created a new piece to tour with the exhibition for three years.
Get inspired by ‘The Lens’, a commissioned sculpture of front-line workers rising to embrace and celebrate the arrival of a vaccine, while a contextual animation invites viewers to reflect on India’s history of vaccination programs by drawing a link with the royal family of Mysore receiving their variolation against smallpox in the late 18th century.
In addition to the museum exhibition, the tour will also be accompanied by a bus which will bring digital elements, museum explainers and key objects to rural communities.
16 Nov – Jun 2023
National Science Centre Delhi, India
On tour in various cities till 2025
Click here to know more.
Wasteland: A Journey
Witness the craft of leading theatre directors Sanjoy Ganguly, Jenny Sealey and Tim Wheeler, as they create a touring theatre performance enriching disability arts. Experience the wonder of a play that commemorates the centenary year of TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ with Mahabharata and Tagore exploring the possibilities of theatre among the D/deaf, disabled and neurodivergent.
Two iconic theatre companies are co-producing this play. Jana Sanskriti from West Bengal, India have teamed with Graeae, UK’s flagship disability-led theatre company and director Tim Wheeler for the collaborative theatre production that uses the Theatre of the Oppressed to address questions of disability for the first time in India.
3 – 13 December 2022
Throughout West Bengal, India
Click here for more information.
Young Minds for a Compassionate World
Join the climate conversation with young people as they bring you photographic stories of local nature. Inspired by the International Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition, this collaboration between Natural History Museum, London and the Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata will bring a sharp focus on perspectives of young people, who will use their own images and words to tell the stories about their local community and environment during a global planetary emergency.
After being mentored this summer on building skills of photography and learning to communicate unique perspectives by award winning photographers of International Wildlife Photographer of the Year alumni that included Rolex Award, winner Shekar Dattatri and Green Oscar, winner Ashwika Kapur, the budding photographers have brought their experience of the natural world to an international platform.
17 November 2022 – 31 January 2023
Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata, India
To know more about the upcoming India/UK Together, a Season of Culture events visit https://www.britishcouncil.in/programmes/india-uk-together/events