St+art Festival

15 DECEMBER TO 16 FEBRUARY

By organising this two-month-long street-art festival, the St+art India Foundation aimed to scatter Delhi with murals, installations and public presentations, bringing art to people who often lack access to museums, galleries and other cultural spaces. One of the festival’s many impressive works featured an astronaut perched atop a colourful asteroid, painted on a building façade in Delhi’s Lodhi Colony by a street-art duo from Switzerland, Never Crew. On a similar wall nearby, Borondo, a Spanish artist, painted a palatial courtyard with a series of grand columns receding into the distance.

But the crown jewel of the festival was the WIP, or Work In Progress—a collection of works by 25 artists, displayed in a massive industrial venue: the Inland Container Depot, the largest dry port in Asia, located in Okhla. The works were painted on the sides of shipping containers, which viewers could often even open and walk through. Shabbu Painter, a well-known artist who has painted signboards for over a thousand fruit-juice stalls in Delhi, emblazoned a container that was once used to ship bananas across India with a bright yellow image of the fruit on the door, and repeated executions of the word “banana” in colourful block letters inside. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the WIP is that when the St+art exhibition ended, all of these painted containers went back into service, transporting goods across India.

~ Vishakha Jindal