Mumbai is taking the museum outdoors — with public art festivals

Last December, St+Art India Foundation returned to Sassoon Docks after a five-year hiatus. Since then, the ongoing Mumbai Urban Art Festival (MUAF) has seen large murals wrap around the facades of old warehouses, abandoned shrimp factories turn into industrial art galleries, and the streets overflow with visitors braving the fishy smell, with kids and the occasional pet in tow.

Instead of formal, sanitised white cubes — where visitors only ever discuss art in hushed whispers — the energy is palpable at the docks as the crowds move in and out of public spaces, laughter cutting through the noise. Art even crops up in the most unexpected of places here, such as the bathrooms. The men’s toilet, for instance, features Nikita Rana’s mixed media work, This Is A Photo Dump, while the women’s washroom hosts Brahmatmaj’s What Beauty?

This year, Mumbai is testament to the power of public art, of how it can break barriers and bring communities together, with a post-lockdown burst of projects revamping the city landscape. The debut edition of the Govandi Arts Festival, an initiative led by design studio Community Design Agency, recently brought attention to the artistic talent that is burgeoning in one of Mumbai’s most neglected neighbourhoods. Across the city, at Fort, the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival returned this week, aided for the first time in its over two decades of existence by government sponsorship. And over the last few months, art platform Floating Canvas Company (FCC) has been setting the stage for the first-ever, city-wide Mumbai Lights Festival, to celebrate the country’s emerging new media talent.

Cameras are welcome here

“I think, during the pandemic, people wanted to explore their artistic side,” says St+Art co-founder and MUAF project director Thanish Thomas. “That has maybe translated to a lot more people wanting to come out into public spaces, and engage with art.” When St+Art first hosted the festival in 2017, it peaked with about 3,500 visitors over the weekends. In contrast, this month, the festival saw over 12,000 visitors. “We thought it was probably people just dropping by, since they were already in the area, but they came looking for specific artworks, with a very specific agenda to experience art,” Thomas adds.

Art has long been acknowledged as a force that ignites change, and public art makes this accessible to everyone — adding value to the cultural, aesthetic and economic vitality of a community. “I think a lot of people are still intimidated by the gallery space,” says Hena Kapadia, founder of city-based gallery Tarq. “So, public art festivals allow artists to reach a much wider audience.”

Three artists represented by Tarq — Parag Tandel, Sameer Kulavoor and Philippe Calia — are showing at MUAF, and all three are experimenting with scale and presentation that the traditional gallery space would not allow. Tandel’s work, Vitamin Sea is a stunning series of glowing resin sculptures that are accompanied by a haunting sound installation. Kulavoor’s collaboration with Sandeep Meher recreates the sprawling metropolis of Mumbai through large architectural models. “Public art festivals are an open space that give artists the opportunity to express themselves in a monumental way,” says Tandel, “For artists who don’t immediately get picked up by a gallery, these festivals can be a great source of exposure.”

Lighting up the city

In a similar vein, the Mumbai Lights Festival promises to expand the public’s vocabulary for what art could be, by transcending the traditional canvas. “The concept of light-based art has been taking off on a global level,” says FCC co-founder Shakti Swarup Sahu, referencing the Light to Night Festival in Singapore and Vivid Sydney. “But the technology happens to be new, and most galleries aren’t equipped to showcase light-based work.”

Part of their motivation to put together a light festival was to give new media artists a platform they desperately need. And in so doing, they hope to contribute to the larger cultural ecosystem of Mumbai as a whole. The festival, which is slated to go up later this year, will take over 15 major city landmarks, including the Gateway of India, Marine Drive, and Elphinstone College. “Our goal is for this festival to become a part of the annual cultural calendar,” Sahu adds. “This, in turn, would have an impact on Mumbai tourism, it would create jobs.”

Most recently, they collaborated with the Kala Ghoda on a projection-mapped installation on the Rajabai Tower. “It’s wonderful that there are so many initiatives,” says Brinda Miller, chairperson of the Kala Ghoda Association. “I hope that this kind of awareness spreads all over Mumbai. The distant suburbs are so neglected, and we really need to create more such public spaces of cultural value.”

The government is slowly opening up to the fact that public art is a worthy investment, but some feel we still have a long way to go. “Right now, their idea of public art is just colour and light,” says Thomas. “They don’t think about the deeper connection, or the curation that it needs to have. But there has been a drastic shift over the years for sure.” Still, a push from art practitioners to make art accessible, and bring it out of gallery spaces, seems to have found common ground with policy-makers’ need to beautify the cityscape. As a result, somewhere between the shrouds of construction dust and upended roads, art has found a way.

The freelance writer and playwright is based in Mumbai.