Concept Note:

Once, when the earth was still young and green, and animals spoke freely with humans, there lived two sisters, Ka Ïew and Ka Ngot, daughters of the powerful deity U Lei Shyllong, who watched over the land from Lum Shyllong. Ka Ïew, the elder sister, was more adventurous and daring, traversing her way through rugged highlands, deep gorges, and stony terrains. In contrast, the younger sister, Ka Ngot, moved with quiet persistence, flowing gently into the plains, crossing boundaries and territories her sister could not reach.

It is a Khasi folktale, retold by Esther Syiem in her multilingual edition of the children’s book “Race of the Rivers.”

The folk tale opens an integral relationship between land and water. The tale becomes a conceptual lens to think through how movement, relation, and transformation unfold across land. If spilling suggests overflow, deviation, and the refusal of fixed paths, then Ka Ïew and Ka Ngot offer two modalities of spill, one that fractures and one that seeps, both equally generative. Their trajectories unsettle the idea of land as static territory, instead revealing it as a field continually reconfigured through movement, negotiation, and relation. Their story stands for a defiance against the logic of containment imposed by states and institutions. These entities often operate through rigid categorizations of geography, identity, or language to maintain control and authority. Spillages, in their fluidity, challenge these constraints by refusing to conform to fixed directions or predetermined paths, embodying a rhizomatic movement that fractures the very foundations of institutional power.

This year’s microSPILLS proposes an online and onsite program in Shillong to navigate this concept of land as a dense field of relations, unsettling rigid structures and enabling new forms of belonging and care.

What happens when land spills beyond ownership? When rivers overflow. When forests expand. When terrain refuses containment. In this sense, the river’s spill extends a mode of relation, one that remembers, negotiates, and reshapes land beyond its containment. Water do not move on land; they move with it. If rivers carry memory across distance, perhaps land remembers too, but through movement, land is never inert. It is always in motion, always becoming, shaped by visible and invisible forces. Here, the movement of Ka Ïew and Ka Ngot resonates with what scholars like Dolly Kikon and Esther Syiem describe as relational landscapes where land becomes an affective and narrative field. As Tiplut Nongbri reminds us, land in Meghalaya is structured through customary relations rather than ownership, while Bengt Karlsson demonstrates how such landscapes continually exceed and unsettle the territorial logic of the modern state. The notion of the ‘unruly hills’ reminds us that land in the Northeast continually exceeds the cartographic logic of the state.

And so, the questions remain. In what ways does land negotiate to co-inhabit, to resist, to yield? And what happens when these flows are interrupted, redirected, or contained?

Program Module:

Phase 1: Online Phase (August–September 2026)

Format: 3 days/week (Wednesday, Friday, Saturday)
Duration: 2 hours/day
Time: 5–7 PM

Phase 2: Onsite Sessions will occur at the Martin Luther Christian University, Shillong (October 2026, for approx. 15–20 days)

Format: Workshop, Field Visit, Collective Reading, Presentation, Discussion, and Development Works, etc.

Phase 3: Pop-up Exhibition

Format: Preparation for the Exhibition and Programming for approx. 3–5 days.

Note: Time and dates are subject to change according to the availability of mentors and guest lecturers.

Eligibility Criteria:

• Young emerging creative practitioners of any discipline from the states of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland, Tripura, and Sikkim, with a maximum of 5 years of experience after educational qualification.
• Final Year Master Degree Students are welcome to apply.
• We also welcome self-taught artists or any kind of creative practitioners from the mentioned regions with a minimum of 2 years of experience and not more than 5 years.
• We encourage different kinds of practitioners for cross-disciplinary interactions among participants, not limited to visual art.
• We prefer lesser exposed practitioners.
• Selected participants need to attend the full program — online and onsite.

We offer:

• Continuous Mentorship by Artists and Scholars for the entire duration of the Education Program.
• Online/Onsite Guest Lectures by different artists and scholars.
• Total travel expenses up to Rs. 15,000/- per person for the round trip (will be paid according to ticket price basis).
• Production Budget up to Rs. 25,000/- per person.
• Accommodation and Food for the entire duration of the onsite program.
• Support for the Pop-up Exhibition after the program.

Requirements for the Application:

Letter of Intent referring to the following questions:

• What are the areas of interest that you address in your practice? (max. 150 words)
• How do you want to contribute to the concept of the program through your practice, participation, and areas of interest? (max. 150 words)

Portfolio/Past Works with images, Bio, CV, video links (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.). Please submit as a consolidated PDF not more than 10 pages, max. 10 MB size.