Take Off Grantees 2021: Devadeep Gupta and Sandeep Gurrapadi
Devadeep Gupta and Sandeep Gurrapadi are the 2021 Take Off Grantees.
Devadeep is a visual artist and filmmaker. With his grant, he hopes to ideate, explore, and democratise historical narratives from the region of Assam that have been overlooked in the mainstream. Sandeep is a performer, community musician and researcher. Looking towards the future, Sandeep hopes to be able to have a meaningful impact on the growth of the urban Indian musical theatre landscape.
Devadeep Gupta
Devadeep Gupta is a visual artist and filmmaker based out of Guwahati, Assam. His practice lies in the mutuality of lens-based media, installations, collaborative performances knit together through concurrent conceptual narratives. Devadeep graduated with a Master’s degree in Public Arts and New Artistic Strategies from Bauhaus University, Germany. Since his earliest engagements in academic and professional spaces as a Visual Practitioner, he has been drawn towards work that engages communities through values of transparency, inclusivity and accessibility towards visual arts. Apart from his personal art-making, he directs his efforts towards creating an avenue in the North-East India through Northeast Lightbox (NELB, a collective co-founded by him and Hrishikesh Chowdhury, a social worker from Assam), that can facilitate more accessibility towards visual art, while generating new audience as well as cultivating an inclusive space of dialogue and exchange for art-makers and practitioners.
As a step towards incubating transdisciplinary dialogues between public realm, academia and contemporary arts within the region, NELB in collaboration with North East Network has developed an archival residency as the pilot project. The project proposes a 1-week residency contextual to the works and records of North East Network (NEN)[1], a prominent women’s rights organisation in Northeast India. Five multidisciplinary practitioners from Northeast India will be invited to be a part of this residency. Starting two months prior to the residency, the practitioners will engage with the archives of NEN, and draw artistic translations of them through their practices. The outtakes of this project will be realised as public interventions in Guwahati, Assam.
Northeast Network’s work since their conception in 1995 addresses three primary sectors: Gender Discrimination and Violence Against Women; Governance and State Accountability; and Natural Resource Management & Livelihood. Using intervention as medium, the idea is to transform the NEN Archives in new dimensions and present artistic illustrations of the work of NEN directly in public space.
One of the objectives of the proposed project is to ideate, explore, and democratize historical narratives from the region that have been overlooked in the mainstream. Using tools of archiving and collaborations, the project tries to treat such records as a part of the collective memory that forms and adds to a greater understanding of the Northeast India. Such archives which constitute a formal record made up of reports, official letters, diary entries, testimonials and images encompass thousands of expressions which holds the potential to unearth multiple dimensions towards looking upon and understanding the region.
[1] North East Network (NEN) is a women’s rights organisation linking with rural and urban women and organisations on development and related issues within North East India. NEN also connects to different civil society organisations on development and social justice issues within North East India. It was set up as part of the preparatory process for the Beijing World Conference on Women in 1995. In the 20 years since its establishment, NEN has become a platform to address women’s human rights. NEN is one of the first organisations in the North East to combine activism with advocacy from a liberal feminist perspective, conveying critical gender issues from the region through dialogue and dissemination. NEN is based in Assam and its work extends to Manipur, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Delhi. NEN has a registered office at present in Guwahati, Assam, with a unit in Tezpur, Assam and Branch Offices in Shillong, Meghalaya, Chizami and Kohima in Nagaland.
Sandeep Gurrapadi
There’s something magical to the art of live performance. Whether it takes the form of theatre, recitals, opera or otherwise. To see a story, a narrative or listen to the journey of characters/sounds/melodies unfold in front of you, in his opinion, is nothing short of a magical experience.
Over the past few years, Sandeep’s work as an artist has mainly fallen into three categories: performer, community musician and researcher. As a performer (actor/opera singer) his work ranges from being on stage as a tenor in opera and musical theatre productions, to singing in classical recitals. As a community musician he is involved in facilitating and creating musical pieces with diverse groups of people in disparate communities. Finally, as a doctoral researcher with the Guildhall School of Music and Drama he is engaged in finding collaborative strategies between India and the UK, that may lead to a meaningful exchange of artistic ideas.
These roles sometimes run parallel and other times intertwine with one another, but the through line is in the values he aims to bring to them. These values being the ‘direct experience’ and ‘authenticity’ of performance; and, ‘the equality’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘collaboration’ of community music and research.
Over the past few years though, he has increasingly become focused on refining his craft as a performer, to further develop his skills and in turn gain better perspective on performative skills needed in collective music making settings.
In 2019, Sandeep was invited to perform at the Beijing National Stadium for the Chinese President and various other state dignitaries representing India. In 2021, he was featured on the BBC One Show, then performed with the Pegasus Opera Company at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and further premiered in new stage roles with 1) 509 Arts productions (Bradford, UK), 2) Cohere Arts (Suffolk, UK) and 3) Opera Sonic (Wales, UK). Most recently, in 2022, he was selected as a finalist in the international Boosey and Hawkes Finzi art song competition and also embarked on a 6-week tour performing in 7 cities across the UK in a wonderful music theatre production - “Meal One” directed by the acclaimed director Alan Dix.
With these experiences, he realised that in order to have a long and meaningful impact as a performer it requires consistent guidance– where a vocal pedagogue can critically evaluate the areas in which I need to work on at a technical level. In this regard, he is grateful to have been awarded the Take Off Grant from the Inlaks Foundation, as this allows him to not only to have access to this expertise, but also acts as an encouragement of his ideals.
Upcoming projects in April 22’ include facilitating a masterclass/workshop for the Royal Opera House Mumbai and performing 6 shows at the Southbank Centre in London portraying the role of the ‘Storyteller’ within the production ‘Meal One’ by 509 arts.
Looking towards the future, Sandeep hopes to be able to have a meaningful impact on the growth of the urban Indian musical theater landscape, whilst also trying to actively engage in the noble tenets of collective music making in community music settings.
