School of Creative
Industries
Neera Gopakumar
Neera is an aspiring arts programmer with a background in visual communication and advertising. Passionate about popculture and visual arts, she dedicated to cultivating the arts in her home city Chennai. She hopes to develop her programming practice with the knowledge and guidance the Singapore arts landscape has to offer.
Thesis abstract
Constructing the art block: A feasibility study on Chennai city’s first independent visual arts space
History presents a record of alternative arts spaces that have emerged across the globe in waves. They have presented themselves in multiple forms – artist-run, alternative, independent. These spaces were dedicated to the idea of offering a space for emerging artists to rely on and they characteristically deviated from what the mainstream institutions and galleries offered. These alternative spaces provided a platform for emerging artists to expand on their practice, gave their careers visibility, revitalised communities, all while encouraging critical discourse and maintaining their independence.
India was no exception to such spaces and houses prominent arts spaces today. However, despite the presence of arts spaces across the country and despite the city’s culturally rich background, the concept of an arts space has not yet been introduced to Chennai. The South Indian city of Chennai is home to the Tamil film industry and currently houses many production studios, arts education institutions and has a rich history in the classical arts of carnatic music and bharatanatyam.
This Capstone Research Project aims to conduct a feasibility study on the establishment of a for-profit independent arts space called “Chithram” with a niche-focus in film, photography and graphic design. Although the findings show that there are challenges that may impede the progress of the space in its initial stages, they also indicate that Chithram is well-positioned to overcome them through strategic planning over time, and exhibits a genuine promise to emerge as the city’s cultural hub that houses its artistic community and integrate itself into the city’s artistic ecosystem.