Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts was founded in 2009 as a not-for-profit, process-based arts foundation by Dipti and Dattaraj V. Salgaocar with the vision to nurture, preserve and promote the artistic and cultural legacies of Goa through collections and archives; to encourage, sponsor and promote innovative work in the visual arts to serve as a bridge between the Goan art community and the national and international art communities; to provide mentoring and resource support to art students and others who want to learn about art.

At Sunaparanta, we believe that culture influences how we look at and understand things around us. We have been dedicated to inculcating this principle of art’s function to shape us, form our values and encourage new ways to approach and live in this world. With this vision, we have developed an integrated multi-disciplinary and community-based program that brings cutting-edge practices while also nurturing a rich and diverse audience.

Over the years, Sunaparanta has been an enabler from where questions concerning our social, cultural environment can be addressed and this is reflected across the spectrum of our work.

We promote a range of cultural activities across various media, geographies and time frames. We work collaboratively with organizations to bring exhibitions that enrich the cultural life and well-being of our different publics. We focus on knowledge production, through exhibition and pedagogy.

Today, our exhibition formats are directed towards generating a laboratory of ideas that address questions concerning care, sustainability, and ecology with greater urgency. We also encourage interdisciplinary research: between arts and science, arts and new technologies through partnerships with researchers and creative professionals is essential as it provides new approaches and perspectives to our current situation.

Research and knowledge production has been a core strength at our Foundation. Our pedagogical programmes include the:

Sunaparanta Art Initiator Lab, our mentorship programme that takes a practice-based approach, open to creative professionals from various streams (visual arts, architecture, design, film, academia) and offers them the opportunity to reimagine and refine their practices through innovative learning (and un-learning) methodologies.

Artist-in-Residence Lab is research-based and offers a space for artists and cultural operators to critically examine existing practices through exchange and dialogue, forging new connections among practitioners across disciplines. It encourages projects that address new approaches related to our contemporary context and that can offer new understandings and perspectives of our society.

In an effort to support cultural operators producing scholarly work in various creative fields, we provide fellowships to those who have been instrumental in bringing critical new projects and whose work can contribute to the enrichment of our creative landscape. Our emerging artist grant contributes to the advancement of research, practice and production.

Our art & theatre program is directed at fostering the imagination of young minds. It places children (from 5 years to 18 years) at the forefront of learning and thinking where they become the protagonists in open and process-based art and theatre practices. Our curriculum is designed to activate the unlimited potential of imagination through live, interactive and animated sessions facilitated by experienced professionals from the creative industry. By stimulating children creatively, we encourage them to reflect upon the spaces they inhabit, the relations they nurture and to think about the values that shape them and their futures.