Through his art, Bengaluru-based graffiti artist Badal Nanjundaswamy has many times brought to light the callousness of the city’s civic administration in preserving roads and other amenities. In 2017, he displayed dummy mermaids and crocodiles about potholes to draw the nearby authorities’ interest to the city’s infrastructure woes. His Twitter timeline has a pinned tweet from 2019 of a ‘moonwalk’ video. What’s fascinating about this video is that it depicts an astronaut walking on the city’s crater-laden roads (resembling craters on the moon), highlighting the disorderly situation of roads. The clip, which has close to 1.7 million views, was an immediate hit and went viral on social media, producing it to the headlines as it coincided with the Chandrayaan-2 mission in September 2019. Last year, Nanjundaswamy painted the city walls to spread awareness about the pandemic. Though the artist’s adore for street art and 3D paintings is mainly reactionary, most of his performs are appreciated for the satirical believed and speedy execution. When we reached out to him, on the other hand, he declined to comment about his inventive effect.
Artists like Nanjundaswamy have left an indelible mark on the city’s crumbling infrastructure, with street art that not only breathes life into concrete walls, but also stimulates conversations. By portraying the difficult realities of our instances by way of murals, street art has today turn out to be a strong tool for inspiration, major to a alter in actions, thoughts and vision. From becoming a straightforward expression of public art to becoming a progressive social campaign, street art is also altering how we view cities.
Coming into its personal
Stunning public street art scenes in numerous cities across the globe have turn out to be destinations for art lovers, as effectively as artists, rendering themes such as dark humour, satire, political commentary, and so on. Belleville, an eclectic neighbourhood in Paris, has an artistic vibe that boasts impressive graffiti street art at just about every corner. Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighbourhood also falls in the exact same category. One of the most effective regions in London for street art is Shoreditch, recognized for its experimental creativity and expressive urban art, and exactly where the performs alter just about everyday.
One of the most effectively-recognized street artists, on the other hand, is Banksy. The anonymous British graffiti artist is recognized for his anti-authoritarian work. In 2010, he was integrated by TIME magazine in its list of the one hundred most influential people today of that year. Banksy has made conceptual graffiti and sculptures across the world, such as cities like Vienna, San Francisco, Barcelona, Paris and Detroit.
Closer home, Mumbai has iconic performs like Boy Hugging the Rainbow close to Supari Tank Municipal School in Bandra, a well-liked neighbourhood for street art. There is also a mural portrait of a lady holding a rose on the Shri Markandeya Co-operative Housing Society creating in the heart of Dharavi. Painted by Italian artist Luis Gomez and curated by Delhi-based St+art India Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that performs on art projects in the public space, it represents the region as a centre for culture.
The national capital also has its share of vibrant street art. Lodhi Colony, Hauz Khas, Connaught Place, Shahpur Jat and Metro stations like Govind Puri and Arjan Garh have a mix of graffiti art. One can see vivid Indian styles in a blend of colours, photos of birds and even depictions of tech advancement such as CCTVs and mobiles. In Goa, FN Souza’s grandson and Israel-based artist Solomon Souza had transformed the northern cityscape with nearby icons like poets and musicians through his take a look at to India for the 2019 Serendipity Arts Festival, when in Chennai, walls in Kannagi Nagar and close to Stella Maris College on Cathedral Road are especially striking for political graffiti and didactic themes. Besides Nanjundaswamy, Bengaluru also has Shilo Shiv Suleman’s stirring feminist murals.
In a post-graffiti and post-modern day era exactly where defining anything gets rather tough thinking about the proliferation, intensification and hybridity of quite a few cultural phenomena, street art has turn out to be more and more well-liked, particularly in the last decade, and is earning a space for itself in the art industry as effectively. Giulia Ambrogi, co-founder and curator of St+art India Foundation, finds street art as a worldwide but nearby movement. “While this art form takes place in specific locations and is seen by audiences that comprise passersby, it has an even larger audience online and through social media. It finds its purest expression in the transformation of the seemingly unchangeable spaces we live in,” she says, adding, “Street art is as in-your-face appropriation as it is a democratic action. Thus, public spaces and city walls become a lab for experimentation and discovery. In this sense, it’s able to trigger an extensive dialogue with the social and urban fabric, and is accessible for all, unlike institutionalised art.”
Bengaluru-based organisation Jaaga, a collaborative neighborhood space to serve the nearby arts and technologies communities, has also led urban neighborhood initiatives that leverage style, technologies and artistic processes towards positive alter-producing. By involving a diverse set of artists, such as visual artists, filmmakers, performative artists, sound artists, poets and designers like architects and item designers, Jaaga has helped transform quite a few public spaces with the support of the nearby neighbourhood. One of its projects was the colourful mural paintings completed by the students of Srishti School of Art & Design in Bengaluru, exploring nearby people today, flower sellers, region workers close to Wheeler Road flyover in Bengaluru. It was extremely diverse from street art as a mode of beautification, says Singapore-based Kamya Ramachandran, who is presently the director of BeFantastic, a tech-art organisation incubated at Jaaga. She was director of Jaaga’s style, arts, networks vertical till last year and beneath whose leadership these projects took spot. She continues to set the vision, tactic, as effectively as hold the programme style of such projects remotely. “While we infused blighted urban spaces with art and design, making them more welcoming, the main aim was artistic experimentation, exploration and community engagement,” she says, adding, “We have also taken this to schools under our ‘Ourshaala’ programme, wherein students engage in art and design-thinking to look at public spaces within their schools.” Such projects, Ramachandran says, are extremely compelling to each the artist and the audience.
Mirror to society
When producing street art, an artist is ordinarily responding to an urban situation he/she is deeply impacted by. And that is how it becomes provocative and progressive art. “What happens when we get on to the streets is that all of the binaries and boundaries disappear and we find each other. Like in families, sitting around a dinner table, you can’t help but explore differences, jump across chasms and find each other. On the streets, when you are sitting at a chai shop drinking tea or sitting in a metro or train, or waiting at a bus stand… there’s a way that all binaries or notations disappear. The street is really a space where we come closer to a sense of union with ourselves, with culture and the people around us,” says artist Shilo Shiv Suleman, who collaborated with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Noida earlier this year, with the art practice reflecting realism, femininity and a need for social alter.
In 2016, Jaaga’s Ramachandran collaborated with a class IX student for a project on domestic abuse, painting a mural on one of the pillars of KH Double Road at Richmond Circle in Bengaluru. The artwork depicts two hands holding a ribbon increasing from the ground, emphasising the situation of domestic abuse. Another one was a performative piece by artist Avril Stormy Unger, beneath Jaaga’s Investment Zone project, which highlighted the overbearing noise of targeted traffic. “We performed under the KH Double Road flyover in Bengaluru… traffic stopped for traffic lights and we had a curious captive audience that began to ask and converse with the volunteers. When a message is performed rather than said or commanded, it has a more lasting impact,” she says.
Many types of urban art are rooted in activism and cultural critique as a mirror to society. There are quite a few examples inside the Indian context itself, with artists like Daku, Amitabh Kumar and Tyler utilizing the streets as a canvas for reflection. “Any public action in a city is political even when it doesn’t directly imply political commentaries. The very idea of activating prototypes of imagination by changing the skin of the city through art is political, as it opens up the public spaces to democratic dialogue and interpretation,” asserts Ambrogi.
Engaging communities
Last year, St+art India Foundation transformed a resettlement web page in Chennai’s Kannagi Nagar into a vibrant district. Drab residential housing blocks had been turned into a series of substantial canvases. One of the biggest constructed resettlement web sites in India, Kannagi Nagar homes more than 80,000 people today. Through St+art India Foundation’s initiative, it was transformed into the city’s 1st art district.
Jaaga also has carried out public art and public space style projects, particularly beneath particular flyovers in Bengaluru. The work differentiates itself from becoming pure street art, focusing on the engagement in between the artists and the nearby communities. “We aimed at exploring the claim that when communities care for their built environment through creative practice (art and design), civic ownership and pride increase, introducing positivity into the negative and uncared for public spaces that could become dangerous to its inhabitants,” says Ramachandran. One of the projects was Yellow UFO (Under the Flyover), which depicts a neighborhood-involved process—people who had been walking by the flyover became integral to the artwork, as it was their shadows that the artists developed performs upon.
Rightfully then, street art is an expression of issues that belong to the street and “the only condition is that it be in a public space. It could be on a lamp post, wall, road, scratch on a wall, paan stain, any kind of markings, signage, hoardings,” says Delhi-based painter and street artist Anpu Varkey, who is element of the ongoing Art Meets Street series by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. Hosted practically in February, the series explored the realm of public art. With a diverse group of street artists, it aimed to recognise the energy of rebellion, activism and the straightforward expression of public art with some of India’s major street artists such as Suleman, Hanif Qureshi, Do & Khatra and Kiran Mahajan.
Varkey, who has worked all more than the country—small and significant cities, as effectively as rural India—considers all walls seen in street art as political writings, with extremely couple of expressions of creativity. Largely, the concept is to repurpose cityscapes. “But that doesn’t mean everything should be painted… there should be a restraint to it as well. Reimagining a surrounding and landscape that’s existed for decades, without destroying it, also becomes an important task for the artist. Painting on walls isn’t about beautifying alone or putting across a social message, there are intrinsic values that a site and space occupy and one needs to be cognizant of that as well,” says Varkey, who assisted German artist Hendrik Beikirch on the colossal mural of Mahatma Gandhi at the Delhi Police headquarters.
Street art connects people today to their streets, feels Archna Menon, senior associate, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), an organisation, which has supplied a number of integrated interventions in sustainable transport in India, such as full streets, parking management, development of public transport, transit-oriented development, gender-responsive transport measures, and so on. “Street art connects people to their streets and public spaces, making them fun, vibrant and memorable. Chennai worked with street artists for the Pondy Bazaar Pedestrian Plaza project and it instantly resonated with many people. Soon there were wedding photos and documentaries shot there. Today, the wall is synonymous with the Plaza. Temporary art plays a crucial role in testing initial street designs too. It helps cities and citizens reimagine their streets and build support for permanent change. One common way is to paint roads to demarcate space for footpaths, cycle tracks or a change at intersections. In these tests, we’ve observed that the use of colours and patterns draws citizens to engage with the interventions and use the space differently,” says Menon.
Cultural phenomenon
One of the earliest expressions of modern day street art, in the 1960s, was graffiti as a response to the socio-political atmosphere at that time. “It is now an art form in its own right… a cultural phenomenon and a complex interdisciplinary form of artistic expression that allows for engagement at deeper levels. It can transform, invigorate and energise societies and bring vibrancy to otherwise mundane spaces,” says Ambrogi, adding that St+art has spearheaded urban art projects considering the fact that 2014 across 20 cities by bringing collectively several voices such as regional government bodies, foreign cultural institutions and street artists. “Urban art challenges the functional use of spaces, triggers curiosity, builds local identity and encourages communities to gather.” It activates neglected spaces by way of art and cultural activities, enabling people today to reimagine how public spaces can be utilised.
Within its framework, St+art India Foundation also offers a platform for education and social awareness by way of a variety of curated workshops, tours and neighborhood engagement activities, the effect of which can be seen in St+art’s districts in cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Goa and Coimbatore.
Street art can have diverse outcomes, believes Varkey. “The outcome could be community building, but it’s not important for the conception of any artwork in the public space. There isn’t any particular role it needs to fulfil. It could exist for retinal gratification too,” the artist says. The artist, on the other hand, rues that the art type has turn out to be more of a spectacle today with corporate funding. What we see now in the streets are massive corporate-funded projects… initially, it was just people today drawing on tiny walls. It’s changed tremendously and has turn out to be a spectacle. Not quite a few people today paint on walls with no any incentive any more… it is usually backed by massive corporate funding,” Varkey says.
The art type, on the other hand, has the capacity to produce new experiences by way of a bottoms-up tactic, really feel quite a few. Besides adding worth, shifting behaviours and enriching the city, public art also performs as a resource for alter and experimentation. “We have seen recognition of urban art by the Smart Cities Mission, as governments are understanding the value of shaping a city through art and culture, and using it as a tool for growth. Also, companies are understanding that they can be patrons of future cities… Asian Paints has been a crucial partner, supporting our long-term vision… the construction of more human cities for a better future,” says Ambrogi.
Speaking HEADS
Public spaces and city walls turn out to be a lab for experimentation and discovery, triggering an in depth dialogue with the social and urban fabric
—Giulia Ambrogi, co-founder & curator, St+art India Foundation, a Delhi-based not-for-profit organisation
The street is a space exactly where we come closer to a sense of union with ourselves, with culture and the people today about us
—Shilo Shiv Suleman, Bengaluru-based artist
Painting on walls is not about beautifying alone or placing across a social message. There are intrinsic values that a web page and space occupy, and one wants to be cognizant of these as effectively
—Anpu Varkey, Delhi-based painter & street artist
Street art connects people today to their streets and public spaces, producing them enjoyable, vibrant and memorable
—Archna Menon, senior associate, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy