Council for Arts and Social Practice

Council for Arts and Social Practice CASP is a platform for transdisciplinary artistic research and dialogues on cultural sustainability.

Council for Arts and Social Practice (CASP) is a platform for transdisciplinary artistic research and practice to facilitate critical dialogues on cultural sustainability. It aims to integrate sustainable forms of thinking and practice by interconnecting landscapes, built environments, people, and everyday life. CASP formulates ideas of mutualism by promoting participatory education, affective lea

rning, and contextual understanding. It facilitates meaningful public interactions through, talks, community initiatives, and collaborative projects, fostering a relational engagement at both individual and institutional levels. CASP engages with artists, curators, educators, architects, designers, filmmakers, community organizers, social researchers, students and children. We collaborate with people in informal urban settlements, peri-urban spaces, and villages through site-specific projects that employ the arts for community engagement and public pedagogy. Activities:
Conversations | Community-Based Projects | Fieldnotes | Participatory Workshops | Creative Learning and Practice (CLaP) | Exhibitions

[Council for Arts and Social Practice (CASP) is registered as a Section 8 Company (non-profit) since September 2019. It was established as the Centre for Arts and Social Practice in November 2013 and has curated a range of programs/projects since then.]

Changemakers, the Doers…the people who want to bring about a positive change in many aspect. The Kolkata Changemakers, a...
19/07/2026

Changemakers, the Doers…the people who want to bring about a positive change in many aspect. The Kolkata Changemakers, an action-oriented initiative of Veditum in Kolkata, where people from the city collaborate to bring about change in the city.

On 21st June, 2026…a Sunday morning, it was the celebration of 2 years of its existence. There was food for thought, action and on the plate(sumptuous lunch) as well. Anuradha, founding member and co-director of CASP, and also one of the KCM member, introduced www.casp-india.org (CASP) and our work in the last 12 years. It was wonderful to know about 7 other organisations, doing fabulous work in the city, it was followed by group discussions with the larger audience.

Hope to join future KCM circles and actively contribute in actionable initiatives in this city.

Veditum India Foundation Kolkata Change Makers (KCM) Amrita Gupta Anuradha Pathak

Thanks to the KCM members for the photo credit, especially, Siddharth Agarwal, Shamika Biswas, Arijit Karmakar, Srijanee Dhar, Megha Malakar, Aheli Bera

Dear Friends,Join us at CASP Conversations with Surekha (Artist, Curator, and Educator) and Amrita Gupta (Art Historian ...
17/07/2026

Dear Friends,

Join us at CASP Conversations with Surekha (Artist, Curator, and Educator) and Amrita Gupta (Art Historian & Co-director, CASP) on Saturday, July 25th, 2026 at 6.00pm on ZOOM.

For three decades, Surekha has approached the city of Bangalore as both archive and living organism. This conversation follows her shift from studio practice to public, participatory forms that activate urban space, driven by questions of gender, ecology, and rapid urbanization.

Surekha began by mapping Bangalore’s transformation - the erasure of lakes, commons, and layered urban histories. Through video, installation, and photography she both archived and interrogated what the city remembers and what it chooses to forget, revealing how urban change is entangled with gendered lives and ecological loss.

Her long-term engagements with BAR1 Bangalore Art Residency (2001–2013), Khoj (2002–2003), Rangoli Metro Art Centre (2012–2015), and VAG Forum (2016–2026) functioned as laboratories for building shared art communities. Moving fluidly between roles as artist, curator, and educator, she tested how public space can host dialogue, dissent, and mutual care.

How can art and ideas grow together? How do we collaborate with communities that remember, repair, and reimagine? Drawing on site-responsive projects and pedagogical workshops, Surekha reflects on art as a practice of collective listening - extending it beyond the studio into lived, shared, and collective articulation.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88108473805...
Meeting ID: 881 0847 3805
Passcode: 691969

For more, please visit www.casp-india.org. We look forward to your presence!

Warm wishes,
CASP Team

22/05/2026

We are pleased to share that our Co-director, Amrita Gupta will be moderating the concluding seminar of "Jugaad: Mapping SEA Practices," organized by the Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust, India, and Take A Part, UK. The project began in November 2025, with a two day seminar where CASP presented its work amidst a range of inspiring practitioners and organizations that discussed the challenges, needs, and the emerging themes in the SEA field.

From January to April 2026, eight mentoring workshops took place for SEA practitioners that responded to the challenges highlighted in the opening seminar, and included Facilitating, Fund Raising, Psycho-Social Tools and Arts Based Tools, among others - and are available on the Katkatha YouTube Channel.

The concluding seminar of this project will launch India's first Socially Engaged Arts Directory, and discuss the conceptual underpinnings of SEA practices and about the specific improvisational logics that the term "jugaad" opens up in regional and translocal contexts. It will also reflect on questions of method and representation that arise when one tries to map dispersed and often non-institutional practices from different geographies and communities.

Thank you, Anurupa Roy, for your warm invitation, and we look forward to a rich and generative conversation at the seminar, which is open to all.

SATURDAY, MAY 23, 2026 / 3.00pm to 7.30pm / ZOOM.

Dear Friends,Join us at CASP Conversations with Mansi Bhatt (Artist) and Amrita Gupta (Art Historian & Co-director, CASP...
07/04/2026

Dear Friends,

Join us at CASP Conversations with Mansi Bhatt (Artist) and Amrita Gupta (Art Historian & Co-director, CASP) on Saturday, April 18th, 2026 at 6.00pm organized in collaboration with DesignWorks, Navi Mumbai.

Limited Seats Available!
📍 Reserve your free seat now.
📧 Email us at: [email protected]

Venue: DesignWorks, 607, Bhumiraj Costarica
Sector 18, Sanpada, Navi Mumbai.

Mansi Bhatt is a lens-based artist whose practice intersects theatricality, body politics, and social critique. Through performative photography, often extending to sculptural and cinematic transformation, as well as public art, she constructs surreal, incongruous characters via prosthetics, costumes, and exaggerated makeup. Blurring fiction and reality, these figures are drawn from family histories in Sihor, neighbourhood tales and street encounters in Mumbai and elsewhere, and interrogations of the structures of the Indian art world. Incorporating gender as performance, her work probes questions of home, place, migration, identity, belonging, urbanity, capital, and surveyed landscapes.

Her layered approach uses autoethnography as a feminist methodology, weaving time-based, site-responsive photography and performance rooted in lived contexts. By embracing personal vulnerability and her body's material presence, Bhatt positions the self as both subject and site, creating a fluid space of generative possibility. Her immersive performances test physical endurance as a trope, especially in policed, denied, or violently reclaimed environments.

In this conversation, Mansi presents selected works spanning two decades of artistic experimentation across performative photography, installations, and public art, culminating in her recent 30-minute film "Pottery House"(2024-25). This film intertwines multidisciplinary threads around home and belonging, and explores the poetics of memory, presence and absence, and acts of remembrance. The artist will also discuss the aspects of place, space, and the public in her practice.

Refreshments will be served at 5.30pm.

For more, please visit www.casp-india.org. We look forward to your presence!

Warm wishes,
CASP Team

We were delighted to host an engaging edition of CASP Conversations, titled “Dancing and Stumbling Rivers,” on Saturday,...
03/04/2026

We were delighted to host an engaging edition of CASP Conversations, titled “Dancing and Stumbling Rivers,” on Saturday, March 21, 2026, at 5:00 PM in collaboration with the Anuradha Terrace Studio, Salt Lake, Kolkata. The conversation featured Siddharth Agarwal (Founder, Veditum India Foundation) and was moderated by Anuradha Pathak (social art practitioner and co-director, CASP).

As CASP’s first program in the new space in Kolkata, we adopted a hybrid format, with the event bringing together an intimate and diverse group of in-person and online participants. Attendees reflected on rivers as intricate fluvial systems and engaged with the ongoing initiatives of Veditum Foundation India. Siddharth, drawing from walking thousands of kilometers along India’s rivers and leading India Sand Watch, highlighted river ecosystem challenges like destructive sand mining. He emphasized the deep bond between people and rivers. Veditum’s community-building efforts for environmental care remain crucial.

The evening was centered on substantive dialogue and experiential engagement with the interweaving of Veditum’s projects with participatory exercises that invited participants to “experience a river” and “become a river.” These activities were thoughtfully interspersed with audio-visual narratives and moments of reflection. The hybrid format enabled active participation from attendees joining via Zoom, culminating in a lively and open discussion at the end of the session.

CASP extends its sincere appreciation to all attendees—both virtual and in-person—for their thoughtful participation and valuable insights. Special thanks to the Anuradha Terrace Studio for offering a warm and welcoming space that nurtures dialogue at the intersection of arts, ecology, and social practice.

Dear Friends,Join us for a conversation with Siddharth Agarwal (Founder, Veditum India Foundation) and Anuradha Pathak (...
14/03/2026

Dear Friends,
Join us for a conversation with Siddharth Agarwal (Founder, Veditum India Foundation) and Anuradha Pathak (Artist and Co-director, CASP). This will involve an engagement with the work of Veditum through a mix of activities, learning through slides and stories, followed by an open discussion.

🗓 Saturday, March 21, 2026 | ⏰️ 5.00pm
📍Anuradha Terrace Studio (2nd Floor)
CK - 134, Sector 2 (Near Karunamoyee), Salt Lake, Kolkata.

📝 Limited Free Seats Available!
Email us at: [email protected]

For wider outreach, the program will be in hybrid mode.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84963048537...
Meeting ID: 849 6304 8537
Passcode: 133390

A healthy river, in modern understanding, is a "dangerous" river, which floods and moves with no respect to cartographic boundaries defined by men. Yet it is the river's dance that has made civilisation possible.

Rivers are complex fluvial systems that are often misunderstood simply as channels of water. But anyone who has observed free flowing rivers, will inherently know that it is so much more. The river contains water, yes, but also energy, sediments, microscopic to mega animals, plant life, and beyond. It is this interplay of elements that makes rivers move, and in turn our rivers shape landscapes / riverscapes. We have however created pits and paths and walls that are making our rivers stumble. While some parts of the world have realised this folly and are preparing for course correction, we in India are committed to repeat the same follies.

Siddharth Agarwal will be speaking on the challenges faced by our rivers, based on his experience of walking 1000s of kilometres along India's rivers, and from leading projects like India Sand Watch that are working to protect India's rivers from destructive sand mining. He will also emphasise on the relationship between people and rivers, and how larger community building inclined towards the environment is crucial. This community building is a crucial component of Veditum's work.

Refreshments will be served. For more, please visit www.casp-india.org.

We look forward to welcoming you.

Warm wishes,
CASP Team

13/01/2026

Dear Friends,

CASP and Mindscape Festival are delighted to invite you to a conversation on the evolution of the Govandi Arts Festival, a community-led arts and culture movement that reclaims, transforms, and celebrates the socio-spatial narratives of marginalized neighbourhoods in Govandi, located within the M East Ward, Mumbai.

Situated at the Natwar Parekh Colony in a public housing neighbourhood, the Govandi Arts Festival positions the arts as essential urban infrastructure for care, identity, and collective agency. Hosted by the Community Design Agency and co-founded by an artist–architect–social worker trio, the festival centres lived experiences, particularly those of women, and foregrounds youth leadership and cultural expression, supporting communities to author their own narratives.

Community Lead and Organiser, Parveen Shaikh, a Govandi resident, brings over 20 years of advocacy for informal urban dwellers, bridging residents and the collective. Creative Director and Curator Natasha Sharma draws on seven years of work in Govandi, blending participatory research, design, and public art.

This conversation explores how arts-led practices strengthen social bonds, activate public spaces, and reimagine urban futures.

🗓 Friday, January 16th, 2025 | 🕧 8.30pm

📍Ampitheatre at the Rock Garden, Nerul, Navi Mumbai.

For more, please visit www.mindscapefestival.org.

We look forward to welcoming you!

Warm wishes,
CASP and Mindscape Team

Address

Navi Mumbai

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5pm
Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm
Saturday 9am - 5pm

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