A game of continuous chance encounters
Common Ground: The serendipitous happenstance project
This game bears similarity with what is also known as life. In life we always expect the unknown. The future, as uncanny as it may seem, is unpredictable. If one has to name a game with similar characteristics it would be the ancient Indian game of what is now known as ‘Snakes and Ladders’.1 This is a game of probability where the numbers on the dice decide the outcome for the player. Similarly, art can produce unanticipated outcomes when open to chance encounters. These chance encounters can lead to many forms of collaboration, from material, to cultural, to social.
Featuring the works of five Australian artists in collaboration with Indian artists, Common Ground: The serendipitous happenstance project was an exhibition, catalogue, and soon to be released film. The exhibition, under the curatorial supervision of Helen Rayment, was shown at OED Gallery in Cochin, India.
The gallery is located on busy Bazar Road, a popular destination for both locals as well as tourists, where there are a series of spice shops and warehouses. Cochin, in Kerala, located in the southern part of India, is a wonderful confluence of all the goodness that nature has to offer; from the luscious spice gardens, to the picturesque backwaters. Not in a typical white-cube gallery, this exhibition was housed in an old spice warehouse. Therefore, locating the gallery was itself like a chance encounter.
Rayment sought to explore the outcome of a trans-cultural collaboration between artists working with different mediums across continents. Her overarching idea was to look for common experiences through divergent practices, or for distinct collaborations between artists. But how is this possible, the differences seem far too much when compared to