'I think therefore graffiti...' is your opportunity to spray paint a Mumbai art gallery wall

If it's happening at The Guild Art Gallery, chances are it's good. Especially if there's an opportunity to be involved, as with The Guild's latest show "I think therefore graffiti…" opening today.

Over the last two years graffiti as a micro-movement has come to be associated with Mumbai in a way that no other Indian city can claim. It started with a handful of Bandra cool kids spraying a suburban wall. But that opened a dialog about who designs, beautifies, creates our cities, our roads, gullies, pavements, parks, markets, and other public spaces.

Who is entitled to use these spaces, maintain them, live in them? Who is responsible towards the safety of these spaces? Who controls them? These are the questions that introduce Rakhi Peswani's curatorial note, taking us into the "chaos of everyday existence" that is life in Mumbai. 

"This everyday is a difficult terrain to frame, to understand, or to draw lines from..." Peswani writes. "A chaotic realm of uncountable visual experiences... cinema hoardings being pasted on top of each other, funeral processions of a local guru or MLA, street vendors going hoarse, drugged beggars sprawled along the pavements, motor accidents, fisty fights between rowdies, urinating men, warning signs for trespassers, glass windows with no entry, private property demarcations, uncontrollable traffic... and various visual instances that can become 'incidents' for the common imagination."

We have already seen local artists and graphic designers try to capture Mumbai's chaotic street life via art exhibitions in white cube galleries or with pithy pop art on retail items like cushions and coasters. "But, there is another concern here," Peswani continues. "Another trope, an area, that almost seems hidden between this urban chaos. Perhaps it is these 'voices' of the street vendors, auto rickshaw drivers, car mechanics, the drugged beggars, the marginalized hijras, pan wallahs, factory workers, prostitutes, and many other voices that seem the most inaudible." 

And more worrying than the absence of this 'voice of the street', is the fact that while we all speak a similar language, Peswani says it "seems incomprehensible to each other; perhaps for the differences of class, caste, upbringing and various other experiential dissimilarities. Even while we attempt to understand each others’ language, the differences of appearances keep our distances intact.

"Graffiti as an art form evolved in the West, from the grassroots; voices these differences. The voices were from those that felt excluded, or from those who felt a need for something that the mainstream was unable to address." 

Thus, over the past few months 20 artists were invited by The Guild from across the country to take part in the spirit of graffiti and participate in a project mostly working through the nights. And now that their drawings are done, the public is being invited to co-create with graffiti on the gallery wall, which will be uploaded on The Guild's website every few days to share with the world. 

The artists participating in this initiative include Apnavi Thacker, Atul Dodiya, Baiju Parthan, Balaji Ponna, Gigi Scaria, G. R. Iranna, Justin Ponmany, Kiran Subbaiah, K. P. Reji, Mithu Sen, Navjot Altaf, Prajakta Potnis, Rakhi Peswani, Riyas Komu, Sathyanand Mohan, Sumedh Rajendran, T. V. Santhosh, Vishal Dar, Ved Gupta and Vivek Vilasini.

So while we expect this show to throw up graffiti art in all its reactionary, individualistic, radical, anti-aesthetic, and vandalistic glory, to borrow Peswani's terminology, she also reminds us not to forget that this project springs from the mainstream and that its aim is to "break the glass as well as hold a mirror."

Exhibition runs till September 8 at The Guild Art Gallery, 02/32, Kamal Mansion, 2nd floor, Arthur Bunder Road, Colaba; tel. +91 (0) 22 2288 0116/0195; www.guildindia.com