Serendipity Arts has announced the ninth edition of the Serendipity Arts Residency 2026, reaffirming its long-standing commitment to nurturing emerging artistic practices through an immersive, interdisciplinary programme. Scheduled over three months in New Delhi, the residency continues to provide a critical platform for experimentation, mentorship, and creative exchange across contemporary art forms.
Bringing together practitioners working across visual art, sculpture, installation, performance, sound, ceramics, and craft, the programme is designed to support artists in developing new bodies of work while engaging in sustained dialogue with peers and mentors. Over the past nine years, the residency has evolved into a vital ecosystem that prioritises process over production, encouraging participants to explore ideas beyond the pressures of exhibition-making.
Smiha Kapoor, Vanshika Rathore, and Pratik Anil Sutar
The 2026 cohort includes Kshetrimayum Gopinath Singh, Vanshika Rathore, Smiha Kapoor, Nirmal Mondal, Pratik Anil Sutar, and Josefina Paz. Representing a diverse range of practices, the selected artists share a strong emphasis on material inquiry, experimentation, and evolving forms of storytelling. Their work spans painting, sculpture, ceramics, performance, and interdisciplinary research, often engaging with themes such as memory, identity, labour, ecology, and migration.
Kshetrimayum Gopinath Singh & Nirmal Mondal,
International exchange remains a key component of the residency, with Josefina Paz (El Salvador/France) joining the cohort in collaboration with the French Institute in India’s Villa Swagatam programme. Paz’s multidisciplinary practice—encompassing textiles, sound, installation, and performance—reflects on systems of relation, territory, and displacement.
The residency foregrounds collaboration as much as individual practice, fostering conversations across disciplines. Artists working in sculpture engage with performance practitioners, while painters and sound artists exchange ideas in an environment that encourages cross-pollination. These shared encounters often shape the residency experience as profoundly as the works themselves.
An Open Studio, scheduled for the first week of August, will offer audiences an opportunity to engage with the outcomes of the residents’ research and creative processes developed over the course of the programme.
Speaking on the initiative, Shefali Munjal, Co-Founder and Patron of Serendipity Arts, emphasised the importance of time and trust in artistic growth, noting that the residency creates space for risk-taking and boundary-pushing across disciplines. Director Smriti Rajgarhia highlighted the programme’s role in building supportive ecosystems for emerging practitioners, where dialogue, collaboration, and critical inquiry are central to artistic development.
Situated in New Delhi, the residency also enables participants to engage with the city’s cultural landscape through studio visits, workshops, and mentorship from established artists and curators. At its core, the programme champions the idea that artistic growth is shaped not only through individual exploration but through sustained engagement within a community.
Serendipity Arts, a not-for-profit organisation, continues to support artistic practice and cultural exchange through its wide-ranging initiatives, including grants, commissions, and its flagship Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa—South Asia’s largest multidisciplinary arts festival. The upcoming eleventh edition of the festival is scheduled to take place in Panjim from 13 to 20 December 2026.
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