“We repeat. We repeat. We fall. We rise,” Paramita Saha says. It’s the last night of November, a Sunday, and she’s at The Red Bari, a hundred-year-old heritage family residence-turned-café in Kolkata. She’s making the closing statement for ‘Counter Encounter’ — a four-day celebration of fifteen years of Artsforward, a Kolkata- and Bengaluru-based arts organisation Saha co-founded with marketer and brands consultant Subhrojyoti Sen in 2010.

Think of Artsforward as an invisible current — only, instead of wind and water, the kind that shapes our atmosphere, oceans, and our physical world, it runs through our more-than-physical world. It flows outside institutional walls, decentralises who gets to experience and participate in the arts, and nurtures young and emerging artists across the country. For the last decade and a half, Artsforward has been building an alternative, accessible ecosystem for contemporary art, performance, and socially engaged creative practices by bringing arts and performances to unexpected spaces and fostering critical discussions.

On 27 November, the opening night of ‘Counter Encounter’, Saha and I sat by the bar at Nutcase Etc. and spoke about her lifelong entanglement with the arts that led to the creation of Artsforward. “I trained as a dancer and worked in marketing in Bengaluru before coming back to Kolkata in 1997,” Saha says.

Her work experience in the corporate world and the absence of public arts programmes in the country prompted her to explore ways to combine the two worlds she inhabited. Since then, she has been committed to integrating art, movement, and dance into social change initiatives, particularly in education, artists’ rights, and environmental sustainability. Artsforward — as a creative agency that advocates for sustainability, audience development for the arts, and supporting emerging artists through corporate sponsorship, collaborations, and crowd-funding — was the culmination of that pursuit. As the co-founder of Artsforward and a self-designated arts manager, Saha has been the bridge between these seemingly disparate and disconnected worlds. “Arts belong everywhere,” she says.

‘Counter Encounter’ was a celebration of that ethos and a show of what it looks like in practice. It opened with a bar-top conversation by Mumbai-based dancer, performer, and choreographer Kian Gupta; it continued on 28 November with ‘Handle with Care’, a participatory theatre performance by Belgium-based theatre-performance group Ontroerend Goed, at The Urban Theatre Project; through Mumbai-based singer-songwriter Karshni Nair’s ‘Some Otherness’ at Skinny Mo’s Jazz Club on 29 November; and concluded with ‘Becoming Bodies’ — an exploration of encounters between the body and space, the body and its environment, the body and the body, and the human and the non-human — by Kolkata-based Continew Collective, as well as Manipuri dancer Kankana Singh, Kathakali performer Abhisikta Maitra, Latin maestro Peddro Sudipto Kundu, and actor-orator Sujoy Prosad Chatterjee at The Red Bari on 30 November.

At a time when how we engage with the arts is increasingly shaped by commercial logic, algorithmic quirks, and an onslaught of generative AI “art”, art-led and artist-led collectives like Artsforward are indispensable for imagining more ethical, equitable, accessible, and intersectional alternatives. They bring the arts back to the world — to its streets, its classrooms, its improvised stages (and bar tops!), and everyday spaces. They remind us that culture cannot thrive in isolation; it develops over years, through peers, and builds on collective participation.

Learn more about Artsforward here.

Follow Artsforward here.

If you enjoyed reading this, here’s more from Homegrown:

The Nazaria Arts Collective Aims To Provide Media Literacy To Underprivileged Communities

The Nest: Inside A Creative Community Art Guesthouse In Alibaug

Step Inside A Factory That’s Been Turned Into A Cultural Hub For Delhi's Art Community