Performing and Visual Arts

Why do human beings create art? What means do we have to understand their economic, cultural and legal universe? What rights do artists possess? In what way does the actual manner in which art is made, shown and sold transform our understanding of art history?

The arts have a complex social existence in India. They range from traditional painting and sculpture, theatre and dance, to modern practices like the cinema and multimedia. Arts practice – alongside opportunities for formal and technological innovation, curation and publishing, for arts and media production, or simply for further research into its complex social locations – has seen major growth in the twenty-first century. The global value of the Creative Economy is $985 billion in 2023 and will become 10% of world GDP by 2030.

The Performing and Visual Arts Division takes an Integrated Arts approach. The Integrated Arts is an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to artistic and creative practice in contemporary times. As imagined at Ahmedabad University, technical expertise or formal training in specific art forms (such as dance, music, theatre, painting, photography, etc.) is complemented by skills and sensibilities that are relevant across various performance and visual arts disciplines. Integrated Arts is about understanding a range of foundational principles that will enable the practitioner to develop competencies that they can apply in creative projects and/or arts disciplines of their choice in the future.

The idea is for a student of arts to be influenced by a wide range of creative art forms within a liberal arts educational environment.  Drawing from the globally expanding Creative Industries sector, such an approach explores ways by which art can enable exciting and significant conversations between, for instance, music, painting, theatre and dance, with photography, filmmaking and design. Art today works in growing partnership with science, legal studies, engineering, and management. It discovers in new media and new materials an aesthetic dimension to new frontiers of knowledge. In the Integrated Arts programme, the student will be exposed to all these many aspects of contemporary art practice. Even while obtaining this multi-faceted exposure, the student will have the flexibility of specialising in a particular art practice and learn that form in the context of related practices.

This division of the School of Arts and Sciences offers both practice and theory-based interdisciplinary courses, by not only blending the Visual Arts and the Performing Arts but also by collaborating seamlessly with other Divisions and Schools at Ahmedabad University. Courses currently on offer include Painting, Drawing, Music, Photography, Storytelling, Dance and Theatre, as well as courses in art history, cultural heritage and cultural theory. In the near future, the teaching and research base will extend to Sculpture, Design, Graphics, Illustration, Printmaking, Ceramics, Textiles, Sound Art, Digital Art and New Media. The programme will introduce students to the diversity of indigenous art forms (including India’s powerful folk, tribal and classical traditions) as well as historic and present-day practices of art in the Global South alongside the North.

Our aim is to produce highly skilled graduates who can be powerful actors in the world through the medium of art. They can also simultaneously use their technical expertise and conceptual strengths, drawn from the University’s broad-based liberal arts curriculum, to work in industries such as media, fashion, design, advertising, journalism and digital arts, among many others.

Over time, the Performing and Visual Arts Division, with a unique Black Box performance space in the School of Arts and Sciences building, and other performance and exhibition venues, aims to become a hub for interactive creative collaboration across Ahmedabad, bringing theorists and practitioners to the city from around the world.