Elephant in the Room

Price: Rs.1500/- for individual and Rs.3000/- for Institutions (further concession, email us at dialogue@conflictorium.org)

In December 2021 Conflictorium issued a ‘closed call’ for applications, only asking for the name and contact details of the artists and writers, accompanied by two or more rejection letters. This was formulated as a critical examination of how ‘open calls’ work in the art world and as a larger conversation on the gaps in the Arts Ecosystem, raising questions such as: Is an open call in the Arts truly open or do its own protocols and prejudices limit it? Are these protocols symptoms of deeper biases restricting the democratization of the Arts and Culture? Why are some Art workers a recurring presence and others utterly absent from the conversations of Contemporary Arts? Is Culture only produced on archival paper? Where, then, can we locate Culture, and how does it influence the currency of an Art and Culture Producer?

Signaling – or gesticulating – in aesthetics, language, and geography is a quotidian method for constructing a network in the Arts. With contributions from 70 pan-India art makers and writers, this publication is a gathering of experiences of such signals, across vantage points – center, periphery, siteless, that collectively offer themselves as artefact, manual, complaint, invitation, and disobedience.