Open Site Project / Serendipity Arts Festival 2016

This is a small review of street art projects that were created for the Serendipity Arts Festival 2016 in Goa wherein we invited 4 graffiti artists from all across the world. The project was curated by Riyas Komu, who also conceptualized two other projects for the Festival - information about which can be found at www.youngsubcontinent.blogspot.in

Reflections

The Open Site project was conceptualised as a welcoming gesture to the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa. Street art is the most public as well as visible form of art, at our aim was to productively use this aspect towards creating a buzz towards the festival. We invited four national and international artists for this project:

1. NemO, Italy
2. Escif, Spain
3. Faith47, South Africa
4. Hanif Kureshi, New Delhi

Each of the above artists spent 7-21 days before/during the festival painting across Goa.

We indicated possible sites where artists could paint. Although, through their interactions with the locals and they respective interests, artists went across to find more interesting spots where their art would gain more contextual relevance. This is particularly interesting since it exposed us unexplored corners of the city, and at the same time, read existing city spaces in completely new ways.

As an assistant curator on the project, coordinating with the artists, I can say that the artists were thrilled to work in an Indian context like Goa. Unlike other countries, the scale of works in Goa was different, and established through an altogether different cultural negotiation. Except Hanif, the other artists navigated the city through visuals and gestures - of course along with our colleague Sabina Banu as one of the initial interpreters. However, the subjects they chose to paint remind us about how we can take so many curiosities of our city for granted. This is particularly evident in the works of Escif who paints, for example, the thali outside a local restaurant, or an enlarged palm showing traditional methods of counting breaths copied off a pamphlet.

Other artists like Faith47, drew lotuses across different parts of the city. She explains in her afterword: "The lotus, while rooted in the mud, blossoms on long stalks floating above the muddy waters. This ability for something so strong and pure growing out of dirty water is symbolic of our struggle despite the chaos of life to find our own strength and spiritual clarity…” The liminal conditions in which people make their lives in urban spaces of India is the key observation of Faith’s work. In her subtle rendering of the lotus, symbol of the currently ruling BJP, Faith unknowingly brushes on a gentle political suggestion.

For NemO from Italy, the figure of a crippled person along the market entrance spurred an artistic response of a mermaid. Similar to the mutated body of the beggar, the mermaid became a clever motif to symbolise the contextuality of the place as well as the person. Lastly, Hanif Kureshi is a street artist who specialises in typography. He created two interesting works for the festival playing with the idea of the present-age acronyms. He painted the word “YOLO” (You Only Live Once) on the rolling shutters of a dilapidated shed which had become home to a poor cobbler. Such a context brings out the paradoxes in both - the subject and the object of art. One of his other works similarly read “FOMO” - Fear Of Missing Out - in an abandoned space across Foutainhas in Goa.

The above notes on the artists’ work is immediate, and can be elaborated upon.

photocredits: Faith47, Escif & author

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