About Five Million Incidents

Five Million Incidents is a year-long project by Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi and Kolkata. It marks the centenary of the Declaration of the Independence of the Mind, signed by an international consortium of artists, intellectuals and philosophers that included Albert Einstein, Rabindranath Tagore and Romain Rolland. 

Unfolding at the premises of both the Goethe-Instituts from April 2019 to April 2020, Five Million Incidents is conceptualized in collaboration with Raqs Media Collective and facilitated by the teams of the Goethe-Instituts and external jury members.
 
Five Million Incidents aims at expanding our notion of art as an extension of the everyday experiences of life. Actors, dancers, visual artists, film makers, photographers, writers, social and cultural activists as well as educationists will explore the “process of making” as a moment of sharing and interaction with their audience.
 
Five Million Incidents is a process of generating temporal and sometimes ephemeral collective moments of working, learning, listening, sharing, and engaging and of becoming. It is a process of bridging the gap between disciplinary process and our everyday activities.
 
It is an invitation to experiment with the possibilities of public space, time, artistic media, communication and interaction, to recognize and insist on new forms of artistic and intellectual work, and to invigorate existing forms with fresh thought and content.
 
Incidents will emerge and dissolve around the Instituts. They will transcend and transform our everyday relationship with the Goethe-Institut premises and its daily activities through intrusion, intervention, disruption and participation by artists from all over India.
 
The nature of each incident will reveal itself only in your presence, sometimes in the span of an hour, sometimes in the course of several weeks or even months.