Harsh Raman Singh Paul

Harsh Raman Singh Paul is taking to the streets of Hauz Khaz and painting the walls. Interesting street art is a rarity in India, where the popular sights are the political posters and ironically interesting kitsch b grade film posters.

"I like to create Art that no one can own. Something that is not created with an intent to sell. It is free and pure. Its for the streets and those who dwell there. Reminding them of the precious things in life, that money still cant buy. All that you need is a soul that keeps you human and an imagination that takes you away."

Poch & Rock

The streets of Mumbai and Delhi , a grimy albeit soulful showcase to the style deviations of artistic duo Poch & Rock.  The french graffiti artist & musician/dj duo also have a book out titled Teenage Kicks. Fresh.  More here & here . 

Aakash Nihalani : by Avinash Rajagopal

Street art is alive and kicking in Brooklyn. It writhes and pulses along the walls, singing along brick tenements, screaming across the doors of auto garages and warehouses. The artists are rebels who are supposed to be in hiding, but who operate under famous monikers and nicknames. Street art is invariably a statement about the urban landscape: Who holds power here? Who is allowed to express themselves, and who isn’t? It is a very rare kind of street art that operates just as well within the formal space of the art gallery, and that actually loses very little by this transmutation.

Such is the work of Aakash Nihalani, whose most recent exhibition opened at the East District Art Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. Yes, he operates under his own home grown Indian name: no fancy monikers like PosterBoy or Gaia. And his fluorescent pink and green outlines of isometric boxes are very comfortable on the bare white walls, forcing me to do a little jig as I move back and forth and to and fro, finding new ways of looking at them.

“A gallery allows me to place my work within the history of art”, he says, “It also allows me to show what I can do given a white wall.” It is this sort of informed comment that gives away his formal training in art, and his background before he came into the art world. Aakash began by studying Political Science at New York University, with the aim of becoming a lawyer. Born to Indian parents, growing up in a Jewish neighbourhood in New Jersey, this was the respectable career path to take. But Aakash admits he was always something of a rebel. He first started painting on clothes when he realised, that he not only wanted to make art, but that he wanted people to interact with it. Now all he had to do was to convince his shocked parents that their son wanted to shift to art school!

Aakash’s tryst with street art began with an exhibition he put up while studying Printmaking. He was taping his prints to the wall, and idly began to trace the outlines of a table’s shadow with the tape. The idea excited his teachers, and Aakash had found his medium. His work before this was abstract expressionist: a preoccupation with surfaces and textured backgrounds. He had already hit upon the device of creating a little enclosed space on the canvas for contemplation using an isometric cube: the basic unit of space. All that remained now was to replace the painted background with surfaces in the real world; and the cubes began to serve just as well to highlight the beauty of the mundane, to force passersby to stop and think a little.

To Aakash, this is the raison d’être of his work: watching people engage with it. In the street, people see sidewalks and staircases in a whole new way through his taped outlines. In the gallery, he uses mirrors with his taped boxes to reflect the viewers or their surroundings in intriguing ways.  And he photographs this endlessly. To me, these photographs are the final work of art: freezing the moment where the art and its audience are in conversation. Aakash explains, “It is a visual cue that cannot be fabricated. It is a function of reality.”

He uses a clean medium (the tape comes off the walls pretty easily) and therefore his work is legal: he hasn’t had a run-in with the cops yet. This consciousness is the most telling aspect of his work. It raises a very important question about street art: If it is really all about using public space creatively and about beginning an open dialogue, why are the artists in hiding?

 Aakash Nihalani is now extending his ideas from street art into other domains: the gallery wall and the internet. But the fact remains that in his work, and in the work of others like him (such as the Wall Project group in India), street art has begun to shed the baggage of secrecy and illegality that has dogged its steps from the beginning. And in doing so, it may finally realise its goal of being not just a serious mode of artistic inquiry, but a real and valid form of public self-expression.

For more images of Aakash's work, visit his website and flickr.

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Avinash is an aspiring design critic/teacher, currently pursuing a Masters in Design Criticism at the School of Visual Arts, New York. He studied to be a product designer, and his heart also beats faster for Indian art, textiles, crafts, social responsibility, mythology and history. 

The Wall Project

This Independance day (Aug 15th) saw the dreamers of Mumbai city coming together to paint the somewhat sordid walls of Tulsi Pipe Road with aspirational messages and images. A simple but infectious idea that has taken many a hobbyist artist's fancy in metropolitan India. The Wall project started it all. Check their website for the story. Facebook for more images.

Dezer, Migwel & Keflione

Three Graffiti artists from France were witness to the 60 hour siege in Mumbai and wanted to pay homage to the soldiers who lost their lives. They re-scheduled their plans and ended up in Delhi, where they were 'donated' a wall by the Religare Arts Initiative. The artists waited to have their spray cans flown in from Paris before they began rendering this historic piece of work. Image credit: Sahar Zaman. More here.

Nitesh Mohanty

Nitesh Mohanty sent in his photographs & I thought they were very interesting. This is what he had to say about them,"I try to capture art through textures, that exist all around us,yet sometimes we fail to notice the beauty they exude. For me textures emote, sometimes with soft child like joy, sometimes with the grime & brutality."

Mohanty has a degree in Textile Design , runs his own design firm called IDESIGN and lives and works in Mumbai

Lakshmi Prabhala

Some intimidating stuff off the streets of India , captured by the incredibly talented Lakshmi Prabhala . More at her flickr stream here.

c-215 and Romanwyg

Stencil street art in India is not a regular sighting , so these captivating stencil illustrations on the gritty walls of Karol Bagh , Delhi come as a (ironically) breath of fresh air. The illustrations were done by famous albeit mysterious French artist c-215 and documented by Romanwyg.

In the words of photographer Romanwyg, "Sometimes threatened, usually uncomfortable with the large crowds that gathered for the spectacle of a couple of foreigners having strayed off the tourist trail somehow and ended up in their unimaginably poor district. These pieces were mainly for the children to see and enjoy, which hopefully you can see from the India Set, they did."

Apnavi Thacker

Born in Mumbai, India and brought up in Geneva, Switzerland, Apnavi Thacker grew up benefiting from two very different cultures. Apnavi is a self-taught artist, although she gained valuable knowledge and experience during her two years of training under the guidance of Bose Krishnamachari.Her work addresses such issues as the possible link between a woman and her self-confidence and level of comfort with her sexuality, and the impact of urban development on the environment. Her work retains a focus on street art. Images and text from here.

Space Invader

The mysterious masked rebel artist strikes India , decorating the already colourful walls with his signature space invader tiles - a pixelated tribute to first generation arcade games. More info here. Via *pmh.

Meena Kadri

These images are from the sharp eyed Meena Kadri's flickr photostream. I love that her images aren't too post-processed & they capture the multi-hued wonder that is India so very well.

We Indians like everything just a little too spicy,sour,sweet. We are not people of subtlety & this is very obvious from our ubiquitous Street Art. Theres so much of colour going on on our walls that we don't even notice most of the time. However, this is something that is rapidly changing in our cities and the technicoloured, dated & often humorous paintings & posters advertising sometimes obsolete establishments are quickly disappearing .In the future there will be more Street Art on MASALA CHAI , to explore this tradition of kitsch for posterity.