Indian Summer offers $25,000 bursary for new Culture Lab: Artist as Healer program
Multiyear initiative to encourage South Asian artists in any discipline to work with wellness community
Indian Summer Festival cofounder Sirish Rao says arts and their healing powers have come into relief during the pandemic.
Photo by Swati H. Das
WELLNESS AND HEALTH meet the arts in the new ‘Culture Lab: Artist as Healer’ program being launched by the Indian Summer Arts Society.
The new multi-year initiative invites local South Asian artists of any discipline to apply for a $25,000 bursary, with a deadline extended to 11:59 pm on December 17. They need to propose a way to work collaboratively with healthcare professionals or other mentors in the wellness community to create a project. In addition to the bursary, they can access additional funds up to $20,000 to cover costs.
“What I’ve seen often with the festival giving a space for artists to express themselves with all their identities present, as well as audiences seeing their culture being amplified and magnified with care and attention, is that it’s a healing thing,” says Indian Summer Festival cofounder Sirish Rao. “Joy is a healing thing and celebration is a healing thing. So clearly a festival can do those things in those moments of inspiration. But I started thinking about how we can do this with a deeper engagement—to work behind the scenes without having to necessarily think about event.”
With major support from the Vancouver Foundation and mentorship from Dr. Arun Garg, former BCMA president and founder of Fraser Health’s South Asian Health Institute, the three-year program invites the artist or collective to produce an event, workshop, or interactive project through research, mentorship, and learning. The incubation lab will run annually with separate artists or collectives from 2022 to 2024.
“Hopefully that will at least demonstrate three specific ways that art can contribute to healthcare,” Rao says. “And then the ultimate aim that we all share is that this will find its way into the healthcare system in some way—whether it’s an artist-in-residence program to help with brain health or post-operative surgery or elder care, or whatever that might be.”
Rao adds it’s been important to keep the application wide open to ideas—that Indian Summer “wants to be surprised” by what comes out of the project.
“I have come from a family of doctors on one side, and I’ve always loved the way that the sciences resource people: they find someone brilliant, they give them some resources, and they say ‘Go do your brilliant thing,’” Rao explains. “Artists are usually on a much tighter leash and don’t have this expansive space.”
Indian Summer Festival’s earliest editions included yoga and wellness programming before the event turned more toward professional arts, Rao points out. The need to return to that realm, in the tradition of South Asian integrated approaches to art and healing, came into relief during the pandemic.
“More and more people are seeing how crucial the arts are for healing,” he says. “There was a time when all artists were healers. There was a time when all food was medicine. So I feel like we’re coming back to that original intent that we had, which is to really give the artists the space as healer in society. Whether it’s as simple as Netflix or the books we’ve read or the music we’ve listened to that gave us uplift in this time, I feel like that’s so clear now in people’s health and wellbeing—whether it’s mental or physical.”
Rao adds that the arts have also played another role in healing from the effects of racism. “I do know having grown up in postcolonial India, and it’s the same for the folks in the diaspora here, that there is a deep sense of shame about your culture,” he says. “You’ve been made to feel your food is funny, that your clothes are funny… So you feel this deep sense of shame.” That hate, and the effects of racial slurs, can have physical and mental consequences, Rao says, and lifting that shame to celebrate South Asian culture is often a balm.
For more information on Culture Lab: Artist as Healer proposals and criteria, please visit www.indiansummerfest.ca.
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