samuha an artists Initiative at ADA Bangalore

Samuha is an autonomous collective. It is an artist-driven and artist-run initiative. Each artist-member is a time-share holder of the Samuha space. Every member has ownership and rights within their time slot. Samuha is about self-reliance and self-promotion. It is about building a community of individuals who have a common desire – to share and learn from their peers, to explore and educate their public on art and its practices.

We have no hierarchies within the community. Artists, irrespective of their fame, seniority or discipline, share the same rights and powers at Samuha. They work in the same space with equal dignity.Samuha's financial partnerships are limited to its members. However, artist-members can individually source or seek grants for their own work or for aspects of the collective space. Samuha will not attempt to gain a grant or fund as a collective.
Samuha is not about building institutions. It aims to remain a free body and is envisioned as a research art-work. The knowledge gained in the process of envisioning, creating, driving and delivering this work is its true contribution.
We are a free body that will run only for as long as its members own their specific time-slots of 17 days per member. At the end of that period, Samuha will only exist as an experiment in the past and a potential model for others to carry into the future.

Samuha’s core vision is to enable the art-community to use and expand on our work so that more and more such self-sustaining collectives and community-driven programs can happen. We hope that we will create a prototype that can be replicated or morphed to suit various initiatives in the future. We secretly hope that this prototype will be used in variations across the state so that art can permeate into smaller towns too.