Friday, July 6, 2012

Road ahead for public art in India

Several contemporary Indian artists are looking to make art part of the public sphere. For example, ‘Neo Monster’, Vibha Galhotra’s installation project, is a continuation of her long engagement with the capital city of India. It incorporates a larger-than-life size earth mover machine created from an inflated balloon.

She responds to its rapidly changing gigantic urbanity through site-specific installations that communicate the feelings of fear and anxiety, to suggest that highly complex legacy of colonialism, religious tensions, and power conflicts have hampered its progression and path into modernity.

Tushar Joag’s work includes gallery practice and interventions in the public sphere as well so as to examine the linkages between politics and aesthetics. For him, art is ‘a way of negotiating life. It's about asking how one does that, about the experiences involved and how life moves on.’ And this is why he is so keen to explore art in the public realm.

Trying to stay tuned to the global public art policy, prominent public spaces in India, including airports in New Delhi and Mumbai are now taking steps to integrate art within their premises. Expected to be publicly unveiled in 2013, an innovative art program for Mumbai's T2 will incorporate specially commissioned pieces and interventions on traditional art/craft objects.

Rajeev Sethi, curator of the ambitious art program for Mumbai's new airport, was recently quoted as saying in a column by Anupa Mehta that, ‘airports are the new shrines of public art. Where else would you get so many footfalls?" He wants to use it as (a) point of departure (or arrival), for inspiring contemporary artists to make visually striking works.

Hopefully, significant spaces such as schools, hospitals, colleges, office buildings and parks under artistically aware managements will also try and get themselves a vivacious visual facelift. Indeed the potential for our public spaces to get repositories for throbbing cultural experiences is immense.

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