Indian Summer Festival

Borderless Solidarities: 2025 Curatorial Theme

With the closures of thought all around us in an era of hardened borders, resurgent strains of authoritarianism and violent expulsions, the urgency to think and live otherwise intensifies. In an unravelling world, we invoke an audacious and unfashionable idea – an insurgent solidarity that refuses the inertias of this troubled time.

We hold deviously to the idea that the world of arts and culture bears the distinctive power to unfold a possible countersignature to the present hour. Through acts of deep hospitality and breathing together, we intend to fracture the inevitability of the inherited storyline and ricochet into public encounters of the possible.

We ask, how can we be together today? What is the time of dreaming? How to amplify the whispered gestures of the periphery? To listen well. To move beyond estrangement. To laugh, to gather, to persist in the face of impunity. To court the ecstatic trance. To disappear and reappear. To reinhabit the capacity to touch and feel. To assemble a brief refuge for the imperishable, a defense of the sensual. A bumpy carriage ride where both tradition and change have room for maneuver. An open door to the stranger, the neighbour and the passerby. Always an insistence on promiscuous alliances and borderless solidarities. To leave open the possibility of the possibility of something new.

Welcome to the Indian Summer Festival 2025. Bring your friends.