Written by Tanisha Cardozo || Team Allycaral
At the 10th edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival, one of Goa’s iconic ore barges is set to take on an unexpected new role as a floating exhibition. Titled Barge, the installation will be anchored at the Captain of Ports Jetty in Old Goa from December 12, reimagining a vessel long associated with the state’s riverine economy as a space for artistic exploration. Curated by Mumbai-based writer and curator Veeranganakumari Solanki, the project transforms the familiar industrial structure into a participatory environment that listens as much as it speaks, inviting visitors to engage with ideas of presence, absence and sensory perception.
For decades, barges have been an essential part of Goa’s landscape—silently ferrying iron ore along its waterways and shaping the region’s industrial identity since the liberation era and the rise of mechanised mining. By bringing this utilitarian vessel into the realm of contemporary art, the exhibition bridges the gap between the everyday and the imaginative, framing the barge as a site of possibility rather than mere function. Solanki builds on ideas from three earlier Serendipity Arts Festival projects—Future Landing, Synaesthetic Notations and A Haptic Score—each of which explored the ways the human body interprets sensory information. These inquiries continue aboard the barge, where its cavernous architecture becomes a point of departure for artistic response.
Solanki describes the barge as a space defined by absence. Its hollow structure, she notes, creates a cavity where presence can form—whether through sound, memory or imagination. She reflects on how imagination emerges in the gaps between what we perceive and what remains unseen, and how this threshold becomes fertile ground for potentiality. The artists contributing to the exhibition—Prajakta Potnis, Hemant Sreekumar and Julien Segard—work directly with the vessel’s architecture, responding to the interplay of sound, space and material. Their works explore the fragile boundaries between the industrial and the imaginative, offering viewers a space to dwell in uncertainty rather than seek definitive answers.
A central element of Barge is an evolving sound work by artist Alan Rego, who has been studying the acoustic behaviour of the vessel. Rego collects sounds from within the barge and plans to submerge a microphone into the river during his performance, gathering underwater noise that will be processed in real time. Using a programme that breaks noise into frequencies and reshapes them into evolving patterns, he gradually transforms randomness into rhythm, noise into music. For Solanki, this transformation embodies the exhibition’s core idea that presence can emerge from absence and meaning can arise from what first appears incoherent.
Solanki’s curatorial practice has long explored the ways artistic forms converse across public and private spaces. Her experience as a Brooks International Research Fellow at Tate Modern, a resident at Delfina Foundation and her leadership roles at Space Studio and The Gujral Foundation reflects a deep engagement with art’s relationship to environment and community. She now co-directs the SqW:Lab Foundation and serves on the advisory committee of the Piramal Photography Gallery at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai.
Visitors to Serendipity Arts Festival can experience Barge throughout the event at the Captain of Ports Jetty in Old Goa. The installation stands as an evocative reminder of how imagination can transform the familiar, offering a rare opportunity to step inside a vessel that has shaped Goa’s industrial history and witness it reimagined through the lens of sound, space and sensory inquiry.
