A Homegrown Guide To The 10th Serendipity Arts Festival In Goa: 7 Events You Cannot Miss

Ten years ago, Serendipity Arts Festival was founded on a simple belief: that culture can make a meaningful difference. The organisation has long held that culture brings joy to society and shapes the way people think.

As the festival celebrates its 10th edition from December 12–21, 2025, in Panjim, Goa, that vision has taken complete form. What began as a small idea has evolved into South Asia’s most distinctive interdisciplinary arts festival — uniting a broad and diverse community across multiple venues.

To commemorate this milestone edition, the festival opens with large-stage concerts at the Arena, Nagalli Hills Ground, on December 12 and 13, with all other venues welcoming audiences from December 14, 2025.

Its programming spans locations across Panjim, encouraging visitors to wander through the city’s hidden sites and layered histories. Here is a guide to navigating its many highlights:

Curated by Sandeep Sangaru, ‘Hands, Tools, and the Living Thread: From Kashmiri Craft Ateliers’ explores the everyday environments of Kashmiri artisans, emphasising the spaces where traditional crafts are practised and maintained. It offers an immersive record of workshops and homes where craft is not only a livelihood but also a living cultural legacy.

‘Hands, Tools, and the Living Thread: From Kashmiri Craft Ateliers’ will be on view on the Ground Floor of the GMC Building, The Old GMC Complex, from 14 to 21 December 2025.

Curated by Lillete Dubey, ‘Nihsango Ishwar: The Loneliness of a God’, is a haunting and profoundly introspective monologue that peels back Krishna’s divine incarnation to reveal the vulnerable man beneath. Set on the final day of Krishna’s life, ‘Nihsango Ishwar’ transports audiences to a moment after the dust of Kurukshetra has settled and the destruction of the Yadavs has already passed. Alone in the heart of the forest, the once-glorious Lord sits, counting his final hours — as a man confronting the echoes of his own choices, devoid of heavenly glory. At META 2025, ‘Nihsango Ishwar’ swept the stage, winning five awards across 13 categories — including Best Original Script, Best Actor in a Lead Role, Best Stage Design, Best Supporting Role, and Best Production.

‘Nihsango Ishwar: The Loneliness of a God’, will be performed live from 12:00 PM onwards and 5:00 PM onwards at The Theatre, The Old GMC Complex, on 18 December 2025.

‘What Does Loss Taste Like?’ is an immersive, multisensory installation by Chef Thomas Zacharias and The Locavore, in collaboration with Immerse and Quasar Thakore-Padamsee (QTP), that explores the slow disappearance of taste, memory, and biodiversity in a rapidly shifting foodscape. Set in the imagined year 2100, the experience unfolds across five interconnected rooms — each anchored in a once-familiar space now altered by climate collapse, cultural amnesia, and technological takeover.

From a kitchen where hardly anything is cooked to a kirana store lined with synthetically constituted food, each room hums with the quiet absence of heirloom ingredients, traditional recipes, everyday rituals, and food stories once passed down by hand and heart. Visitors are invited to encounter this loss not through spectacle, but through intimacy. Projected memory fragments, hollow ceremonial meals, and a final staircase that reignites hope trace a speculative yet emotionally grounded journey through grief, longing, and tender resistance. This is not dystopia. It is a near-future mirror — close enough to feel real, urgent, and entirely possible.

‘What Does Loss Taste Like?’ will be on view on the First Floor of the Directorate of Accounts from 14 to 21 December 2025.

Curated by Anuradha Kapur, ‘The Legends of Khasak’ is an immersive theatrical performance based on O.V. Vijayan’s iconic magic realist novel of the same name. It traces the journey of a young man who arrives in a remote village in Kerala, burdened by a troubled past. As he begins teaching at the village's single-teacher school, he becomes increasingly immersed in the land’s rich tapestry — its people, myths, and the haunting whispers of its legends.

‘The Legends of Khasak’ will be performed live at the SAG Ground from 6:30 PM onwards from 17 to 21 December 2025.

Disclaimer: Some scenes feature ritualistic content that may be intense for very young children.

What makes a place linger in memory — its performance, its people and its flavour?

Mary, a firecracker of a woman, runs her family’s taverna and is keen to put the business on the map; her father, fiercely rooted in tradition, is opposed. The performance invites you to inhabit that world: to eat, listen, and remember as stories unfold between courses — of migration, fading traditions, and a community fighting for its identity.

Curated by Chef Manu Chandra, ‘Goa is a Bebinca’ is a living, breathing feast that explores how tradition and innovation coexist, celebrating a place that still invites strangers to sit together and find themselves in each other’s stories. Learn more here.

Curated by Rahab Allana, this exhibition examines contemporary image-making through the lens of displacement, treating it as a defining condition of today’s political and emotional landscape. Featuring artists from the Gulf and beyond, it traces how post-1950s decolonial strategies across South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa merged street culture, journalism, and folk forms into subversive visual languages. The project reconsiders location as unstable and highlights the shared artistic networks shaped by migration, overlapping histories, and popular culture. Through satire, gendered critique, and fluid border concepts, the show explores identities in flux, where centres and peripheries continually shift.

‘Displacement’ is supported by The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.

‘Displacement’ will be on view at the Old PWD Complex from 14 to 21 December 2025.

Wild Wild Women is India’s first all-female hip-hop crew, featuring rappers Pratika, Krantinaari, Hashtagpreeti, JQueen, and MC Mahila. Rooted in Mumbai’s streets and fluent in multiple Indian languages, the crew combines fierce lyricism, political commentary, and raw feminine power to challenge patriarchy, casteism, and gender norms through their music and performances.

Wild Wild Women will perform live on the main stage at the Arena at Nagalli Hills Ground from 7 PM onwards on 19 December 2025.

Explore the complete programme of the 10th Serendipity Arts Festival here.

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