The serene hilltop of Altinho in Panjim will host a compelling storm of ideas, contradictions, and creativity. On July 1, 2025, the Altinho-based Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts unveils Buttered Bread on a Cat’s Back, an evocative group exhibition marking the culmination of the fourth edition of the Sunaparanta Art Initiator Lab (SAIL), a 10-month mentorship programme led by art historian Lina Vincent.
The exhibition brings together works by ten emerging Goa-based creative practitioners, each of whom has spent the past year engaging in critical dialogue, conceptual development, and peer-led experimentation. The result is a thoughtful, multidisciplinary showcase that reflects on the fragile balance between personal memory and collective transformation.
THE PARADOX AS STARTING POINT
Inspired by the whimsical buttered cat paradox, where a cat always lands on its feet and a toast always lands butter-side down, the exhibition's title playfully gestures at the contradictions we live with.
What happens when opposing forces meet? When nostalgia collides with change? When art resists certainty? These questions animate the works on view, spanning installations, video, drawing, object-based art, and storytelling.
Themes of land, belonging, identity, and materiality echo across the gallery spaces, framed by the evolving role of the artist in contemporary society.
From hand-written letters to digital archives, natural pigments to community rituals, the participating artists tap into Goa’s layered landscape, not just geographically, but emotionally and historically.
MEET THE ARTISTS
The featured artists reflect diverse paths and perspectives.
Leticia Alvares: She uses the puzzle as both, medium and metaphor to explore memory, loss, and reconstruction.
Siddhi Arsekar: She interrogates beauty standards and body modification practices through critical writing and lived inquiry.
Shubham Chari: He blends carpentry with sculpture, grounding memory in material tradition.
Rutika Anand Dessai: She paints with pigments made from her hometown’s soil, preserving Goa’s vanishing terrains as acts of resistance.
Deepa George: She revives the art of the handwritten letter, connecting viewers to a tactile past that still whispers relevance today.
Geetesh Gawas: As a self-taught filmmaker, he channels his lens toward Goa’s changing identity through long-form storytelling rooted in everyday life.
Pritesh Naik: He documents traditional float-making, treating it as both cultural memory and community performance.
Nehal Parker: He fuses local landscape and ritual into poetic narratives that celebrate nature and tradition.
Shriya Pant: She captures quiet emotional undercurrents in everyday life through writing, photography, and introspective art.
Venkatesh Pai: He treats drawing as a process, layering fragments of thought into open-ended visual compositions.
MORE THAN AN EXHIBITION
Buttered Bread on a Cat’s Back is not just a closing event, it is a milestone in Sunaparanta’s mission to create sustainable spaces for contemporary artistic development in Goa.
Since its launch in 2021, SAIL has emerged as a rigorous platform for cross-disciplinary mentorship, enabling practitioners to navigate the intersections of practice, pedagogy, and place.
As the exhibition runs from July 1 to July 15, 2025, it invites the public to enter not just a gallery, but a living lab of ideas, where contradiction, ambiguity, and transformation coexist. In an increasingly polarised world, this show reminds us that the most meaningful art often lives in the in-between.
DETAILS
WHAT: Group exhibition (Buttered Bread on a Cat’s Back)
WHEN: July 1 to 15, 2025
OPENING: Tuesday, July 1, 2025, 6.30 pm
TIME: Monday to Saturday (10 am to 6.30 pm)