20 14 15
The Peenya Project
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Art in Transit The Peenya Project 2014-15 Website: www.artintransitbangalore.com Email: srishti.artintransit@gmail.com Facebook: www.facebook.com/artintransitproject A centre run by Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology C.A. Site No.16, Yelahanka New Town, Doddaballapur Road, (Opp. Wheel & Axle Plant) Bangalore - 560 106
ART IN TRANSIT Art in Transit is a public art project facilitated by the Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Bangalore, in partnership with the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation. The project aims to create meaningful artistic interventions in spaces of transience. Acknowledging the rapid pace of growth, movement and development that Bangalore is experiencing, Art in Transit uses art, design and technology to facilitate a dialogue between people and the urban spaces that they inhabit. The project began in July 2014 with a pilot at the Peenya Metro Station. Our collaboration with the metro creates opportunities for the stations to be cultural hubs that facilitate meaningful interactions through public art and design projects within the communities they serve. As Bangalore grows swiftly into its latest avatar as a megacity, the new roadways, flyovers and modes of transit are already carving out a new landscape. While the city’s population often struggles to adjust to these changes, we believe that art can provide the tools to enable dialogue with this transition. Art and design practitioners and students immerse themselves in research in order to inform and enrich their responses to site. AIT is offered to students at Srishti who wish to enter or expand their practice into the realm of public art. It provides opportunities for the students and practitioners to build theoretical frameworks from practice as one creates and reflects on the implications of art in public spaces in Bangalore. As a result, this project is characterized by a diversity of philosophies, practices and approaches. From art that expresses, mediates, activates and instigates, our artists explore the full spectrum of what it means to intervene in public space. Alongside the metro endeavour, Art in Transit has begun to expand out into different types of public spaces, to reach multiple audiences and collaborate with several artists and organizations in order to realize its vision for the city.
NOTE This book is a lookback on Art in Transit’s one-and-a-halfyear-long journey through the Peenya Pilot, documenting the people, places and projects we have engaged with from 2014-15. The uniqueness of Art in Transit is in the fact that it situates itself at the intersection of several different spheres: on the one hand it is an academic space that facilitates the development of student practices, on the other it’s a collaboration with active clients that have tangible requirements to be met; it engages with communities in the vicinity of the station while also justifying itself to the art community; it has to accommodate individuality in expression, but also curate these expressions into a larger cohesive vision; it is a space that has to allow for process, change and even failure, but also produce what can largely be considered a successful tangible output. Working within these tensions, a project of this magnitude only realizes itself through a collaboration between several different forces, both big and small, from the faculty to the student, from the top-level bureaucrat to the tea shop vendor, from the structural engineer to the metal fabricator, from the metro commuter to the station security guard. The ideas that have manifested themselves in the station are a distillation of several processes, conversations, interactions, trials and errors that, for the most part, remain invisible to those on the outside. The documentation of such an endeavour therefore demands a certain level of sensitivity to both the brick and the mortar that went into the building of this project. It is with this intention that this book has been structured so as to acknowledge the various elements that came together over the last one-and-a-half years and, in doing so, make visible the layers underneath what finally manifested. Ruchika Nambiar Former AIT student (Jul - Dec 2014) Research Assistant & Project Coordinator (2015)
C
O
N
T
THE PEENYA PILOT
PROJECTS
14
The Peenya Pilot Project
44
Wires & Walls
17
Place & Site
50
A Migration of Residues
20
Immersion
56
Walled Visions
27
First Moves
62
Stories Behind the Door
31
Moving into Phase II
68
Breaking Barriers
33
Final Fabrication
74
Undulating Planes
34
A Third Semester
80
Translation of Reality
86
The Lilliput Proletariat
THE OPENING
92
Skew
163
The AIT Interim Team
98
See Peenya
168
Srishti Interim 2015 at Peenya
104
Step by Step
173
Launching the Peenya Station
110
Jitni Mann Ki Daud
Shambhavi Singh
116
Colours of Peenya
Aroushka D’mello
122
Control of the Void
128
The Stasis Syndicate
Reuben Samson
134
While You’re Waiting
Siddhanth Shetty
140
Synergy
146
When Objects Breathe
152
Sonder
Veda Thozhur Kolleri Fabrice Grolaire
Raj Palan Devika Shah
Shail Suneja Harleen Chatha Ishita Biswas Ruchika Nambiar
Natasha Sharma Akshaya Zachariah Prateek Vatash
Manush John
Ria Bajaj Jaivardhan Channey
Deepti Ramakrishnan
E
N
T
THE AIT TEAM 182
Arzu Mistry Team lead + faculty
183
Amitabh Kumar Team lead + faculty
184
Samir Parker Project Faculty
185
Agnishikha Choudhuri Project Faculty
186
Evan Hastings Project Faculty
187
Research Assistants
TALKS/WORKSHOPS/EVENTS 194
AIT in Kandivali
194
Debunking Binaries
195
The Anatomy of Pedagogy
196
Artist Talks and Workshops
PARTNER PROFILES 200
Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology Organizing Institution
200
Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation, Ltd. Infrastructural Partner & Host Organization
200
Ample Technologies Sponsor for Peenya Project
202
Collaborator Index
206
Book Credits
S
THE PEENYA PILOT
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Art in Transit began in July 2014 in collaboration with the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation, with a vision to transform Bangalore’s metro stations into cultural hubs. Running a pilot at the Peenya Metro Station, AIT engaged with the site in three six-month-long semesters, bringing together graduating students from Srishti to conceptualize and realize art and design projects at the station. This section documents the activities and processes AIT students and faculty engaged in, to realize their vision for the station.
THE PEENYA PILOT PROJECT An Overview The ongoing construction of the Namma Metro in Bangalore has permanently changed its urban landscape. Art in Transit began with asking how we could best use art and design to develop a sense of community ownership for a shared history and a future vision of the city. We hoped to regain masked local identities and build new ones specific to different communities where stations exist. This intention was not with a view of preservation or nostalgia, but instead to fight against the homogenization of the city and counter this with local subcultures that were place based. How was Peenya Station different from Ulsoor? Could a station become a destination in itself and be a cultural symbol for a community? Peenya was our first site. This part of the city has always been a vital bloodline for the rest of Bangalore. From its agricultural history to becoming the largest industrial hub in Asia and now to the coming of the metro, this area has seen considerable change. How could an immersive experience that engaged with and invited participation from the Peenya community and commuters, create cultural links that allowed for new shared experiences of place. The project was offered to graduating final-year students at Srishti, giving them the opportunity to engage in an intensive public art project and bring to the table a diversity of practices and perspectives as they conceptualized and manifested art and design projects in the station. Given that the project was being conducted within an academic space, it provided students with the space for exploration, offered support with the development of tools to further their enquiries, enabled them to articulate and justify their ideas and processes and finally equipped them with the resources to realize their ideas in the public sphere. Due to the fact that the academic, funding and fabrication timelines didn’t always align with one another, the work at Peenya station took a total of three semesters to manifest. Over this period, AIT engaged a total of 42 final year students in research, proposal building and prototyping. Of the 42, 19 students and graduates continued with AIT into the funded phase of the project and realized their ideas at the station. Besides final year students, in the third semester, AIT also ran studio and interim courses at the Peenya station for 2nd and 3rd year students at Srishti, allowing them to respond to the site with multiple experiments, small scale and temporary works. AIT has brought together multiple
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faculty with expertise in various different fields, to guide the students in their enquiries. Besides the development of individual projects, there were several collaborative activities the students and faculty were involved with, such as fundraising strategies, setting up exhibitions, engaging in workshops and charettes, and finally working on an overall curatorial strategy for the station. We’ve encouraged a collaborative environment where students can build off of each other’s ideas, choose media mentors and interface with several different faculty at Srishti, find and share resources and build a network of vendors and fabricators in the city. In addition, we’ve received a range of support from the BMRCL in realizing our ideas at the station, right from its top-level management to its ground staff at the Peenya station. The Peenya Project has seen over 50 prototypes, experiments and temporary interventions, and now stands as a series of 19 permanent artworks that range from light and playful to engaging and thought provoking comments on history, development, community, architecture, transit and urban life. We’ve aimed to humanize the station and strengthen the community’s relationship with it through our installations, murals, public space furniture and interactive engagements. Over one and a half years, our artists have built strong bonds with people in and around the station through their experiments at the station. The final work itself generates a variety of responses and questions among those from the art community as well as those outside it. Each project comes with its own trials, successes and failure, but ultimately, what this has brought to Art in Transit and to the station, is a diversity of ideas, philosophies, processes and approaches. And it is that diversity that allows us to always question, challenge and complicate our stance when it comes to our engagement with the city and its public, and never become too comfortable with any one approach to public art.
It is the diversity in ideas, philosophies and processes that allows us to always question, challenge and complicate our stance when it comes to our engagement with the city and its public, and never become too comfortable with any one approach to public art.
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The dusty atmosphere, and the shrill sound of blades cutting through granite or metal define Peenya as an Industrial hub.
Surveying the unpopular areas of the Peenya landscape revealed a scape of forestland, before the whip of urbanization.
Peenya has a very dull look to it with its cemented grey toned buildings, sites in mid construction and its dust filled environment.
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Peenya was reminiscent of the old Wild West, in the way it visually presented itself, with dust rolling about in the air, and a general feeling of being deserted and devoid of human presence.
The place is dry and rugged, dusty and mechanical. The flyovers reminded me of the Amazon River and the station of a civilization.
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PLACE & SITE Peenya, Bangalore It would be easy to engage with Peenya as just an industrial area. Doing so, however, would be ignoring the dynamic state of flux that the city of Bengaluru has found itself in the last decade. What used to be raagi fields and farmlands, began to transform into Asia’s largest industrial area. This industrial identity is now steadily being eroded by large scale building corporations and businesses, malls and hotels now replacing manufacturing. Peppered between these new high rises are spaces like the HMT ghost township, and a constellation of other abandoned factories that make the idea of the industrial more complicated. The vision of Namma Bengaluru is expanding, and the mascot for this expansion is the Namma Metro. The community immediately around the metro station were the hardest hit with the construction, dividing Peenya’s landscape down the middle. Peenya, like many others parts of the city, is an example of a place in transit, a place held within the threshold of developmental strategies. What is this vision of a developed Peenya? How does the metro perpetuate it? How do we respond to it?
we’ve seen a diversity of cultures and spoken languages. Our students have engaged with Peenya using several different lenses. While most first impressions revolved around the dreariness of the landscape, the students probing into the area has nuanced their views and built understanding on the various forces that transformed it into what it is today. While some engaged with the poetics of urban decay and disintegration, others explored the spectrum between the natural and the mechanical. Some engaged intimately with the living community pockets in the area while others extrapolated cues from the landscape into whimsical narratives and fantasies. Over time the students either developed a deeper, more layered understanding of their initial impressions, or changed their views about the area drastically.
Our research in Peenya has unearthed that the communities in and around Peenya are made up of several migrant workers employed by industries and factories in the area. As a result 17
“Have you been on the metro even once?” “No. I would never.”
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Peenya Metro Station The Peenya Metro Station is a metro station on the Green Line of the BMRCL’s Namma Metro service. While the Purple Line connecting MG Road to Byappanahalli is commonly considered the “commercial” line, the Green Line which currently connects Nagasandra to Mantri Square is considered largely a “work” line. Given that it will soon connect to the city centre Majestic and City Railway station, it hopes to be the line that enables large numbers of people to commute to work to and from the city centre. The Peenya Station was close to completion when Art in Transit entered the station in July 2014, making it ideal as a testing ground for a pilot project before moving on to
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other more developed stations. Once the line connects to the city centre, the BMRCL expects an exponential increase in footfall. For this reason, the stations along this line are very large. Furthermore, there are spaces in the Peenya Station that may be turned into commercial spaces, cafes, shopping centres, etc.
Currently however, the station’s footfall isn’t very high, leaving it a vast, empty space for the majority of the time. When students first engaged with the station, it was this vastness that struck them and coloured their impressions of the space, all evidenced by the vantage points from which they chose to sketch or photograph the space. Ultimately, with their projects, the students have all tackled the issue of vastness in different ways with their interventions, some choosing to deal with it directly, while others found ways to sidestep or work around it.
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The Peenya metro station is considered an alien structure in its environment.
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Walking into Peenya for the first time was quite definitely a boost in morale. The station was huge, airy and had a ton of natural light coming in from everywhere.
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IMMERSION We began our process at Peenya by immersing ourselves in the place and developing tools that would help us understand the social, political, geographic, historical, cultural, economic context we had come into.
Sketching Sketching was the first tool used to understand and translate one’s relationship with the metro space into a tangible form. It was a way to grasp how space spoke to the views and each student developed their own understanding of lines, volumes and dimensions. The resultant bank of drawings ranged from clean and precise architectural drawings to more playful, experiential ones.
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Metaphor Making Moving from the observed to the experienced, we formulated metaphors that captured the essence of the metro’s purple line. Metaphors allowed access to the intangible aspects of place and opened up visualizations. Recurring themes that surfaced showed the alienness of architecture and monotony of the location as contrasted with the large “newness� of the spaces.
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Mapping In order to manage the complexity of the space we were mapping and attempting to dissect, we made some test maps by exploring a 2-km radius around the college campus in Yelahanka. Pairs of students divided the area into eighteen segments and began with a brief of mapping “what Google Maps couldn’t show us” and collectively developing a legend as a class, the pairs determined their own criteria for mapping their slice. The maps that emerged were wide and varied: a walking map, a smell map, a sound map, a bird’s eye view map, a street dog map, a vehicle registration map, a colour map among many others. The students assembled their slices back into a single conglomerate circle to surface insights about the place.
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Repeating in Peenya Having tested these tools out and grasped some of their possibilities and limitations, we then moved to exercising them at the Peenya Station, first developing sketches and drawings of the station, then generating metaphors for the metro line (this time in groups), and finally using self-determined filters to map the area. The types of maps were varied: from mapping commercial establishments, local and branded eateries, and factories to advertising, footwear, light, trees and shadows, to sound, i12.
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to spoken languages, to reasons why people didn’t use the metro. These were all conducted with the intention of understanding the context of Peenya through different lenses, with each individual adding new facets to that understanding, through the act of sharing their material with the rest of the group. Mapping was an important aspect of the students’ research as they chose their own filters to understand how different elements came together within a context to form a dynamic system. The students collectively did a full photo-stitch of the Green Line to help visualise the changing landscape across the line. This immersion phase ended with presenting all the content generated so far to the General Manager Finance of the BMRCL, Mr. Vasanth Rao, during the first seminar Mela at Srishti.
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In order to address the monotony of the metro I propose an artifact that engages the traveller. This could be an interactive sound installation, which is complimented with kineticisim. The visuals of the microbial illustrations could also be introduced aesthetically to . . .
An installation that will tell stories of Peenya with an emphasis on form, texture, feel, appearance, flow and rhythm. I’ve been exploring two visual effects created by ‘scanimations’ and the ‘moire effect’. I feel these forms convey of both flexibility and flow and create a fascinating industrial . . .
Belonging to this globalized society I feel the need to reintroduce certain things such as growing your own food, taking ownership and eating healthy. Despite the favourable climate in Bangalore, till now I have never seen any deliberate plantation of vegetables or fruits here . . .
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I intend to bring out the relation between dreams and transit through my project in “Art in Transit”. Dreams are a space which simultaneously ease and reinforce reality, such should be the relation of the metro to the journey of life. Dreams are journeys and escapades and the commute through the metro . . .
Dust as a Persona, is also a Traveller. Hence, the way forward would be a rigorous exploration of Peenya and its dusty contents. To record all the different kinds of dust that travel through and the stops they make. The collection of the different kinds of dust and the surfaces that they inhabit. The imprints they leave . . .
I want to find and engage with transitional spaces in the station. We transit so frequently that we are not even aware of the presence of the transitional space. I would create an installation or kinetic sculpture that would draw attention to these spaces, while creating a seamless transition from the insulated interiors . . .
The station can be transformed from an alienating experience and underutilized space into a place that the locals would want to visit for reasons other than transit. Gender discrimination and violence is an issue that has affected me from a very young age. My exposure to women artists, feminist thought and a . . .
I aim to create a direct and tangible link between the people of Peenya and the station using sustainable interactive sculptural installations using a wide variety of materials from Peenya. It will serve as a celebration of the city’s development. It will be interactive so as to allow people to engage with . . .
A map can help you discover new places or simply to see a place through someone else’s eyes. Currently the only maps available of Peenya are topological. I want to explore how far the boundaries of what constitutes a map can be pushed, how it can shape place through imagination . . .
FIRST MOVES Early Proposals In August 2014, students put forth their first proposals for the Peenya Metro Station. Ideas were proposed for a particular site or timeframe and could broadly be categorized into: interaction with community, building of whimsical narratives, working with Peenya’s history, Issues of access particularly gender dynamics of public space, working with spatial aspects of the station, and working with the idea of the technological versus natural. Forms proposed ranged from participative interactions, furniture, sculptures, found and scrap art and 3D installations to miniature dioramas, terrariums, anamorphic art, murals and printed media.
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Ksana: The Work-in-Progress Exhibition Prototyping of initial ideas built intensity as we moved into the station and set up studio space on site in August and September 2014. Iterations and scaled prototypes transformed ideas and proposals began to take shape. Between the 26-28th of September students and faculty presented a prototype work-in-progress exhibition; Ksana: Finding Interludes, to share initial ideas, get feedback and attract potential funders for the project. The students either fabricated a section of their final piece or they made a scaled down prototype or they conducted interactive experiments in the station. As such, the station was filled with sections of murals, 3D sculptures, miniatures and dioramas, scaled down prototypes, commuter-interaction experiments, printed flex panels and the like. While the exhibition was well-received, and community members, metro staff and invitees were excited about the ideas shared, we were naive about the exhibition leading to funding. Our intention around raising funds for the project were grounded in the larger philosophy and intention of
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the project as one that builds place-based identity for Peenya. This approach is what we hoped would manifest in funding. Would it be possible through the prototype exhibition to attract business, community members and industrialists from around the station to be funders for the project? The people we were reaching out to did not have a familiarity with the arts, particularly public art, and this was a project that was a first of its kind in Bangalore. We had no models to fall back on. We had deliberately stayed away from regular art funding agencies in a desire for a place supported project. We attempted to raise funds by sharing the project with many local agencies, and received good intentions, but no real funding.
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Proof of concept and visualisations Given the challenges with funding, we could no longer continue prototyping at the station. October and November 2014 were spent refining ideas and building skillsets. While the graduating fifth year students worked towards their final juries and graduation showcase, creating final workable prototypes/plans that could be ready for execution if and when funds came through, the fourth year students worked on creating three versions/prototypes of their ideas as their final submission for the semester. Simultaneously, the faculty and a group of students worked towards creating pitch presentations and visualisations to share with potential funders to raise funds for the next semester. The first semester of AIT ended in December 2014 with the fifth year final juries, the Srishti Grad Show of 2014, and a few promising leads in terms of finding sponsorship for the project.
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MOVING INTO PHASE II Reacquainting with site
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In January 2015, the second semester of Peenya began where the first had left off. Nine students from the previous group continued with the Art in Transit project joined by two new students. We were an invigorated band of eleven and resumed thinking about our approach to Peenya. Given the experience of the first semester and the fact that the majority of the group was already acquainted with Peenya, it gave students the flexibility to design custom tools for research and exploration, specific to their individual relationship to the space. The first month was filled with Peenya walks, artist presentations, and individual project research that would help inform the students’ final ideas that they would propose to execute in the station. Each of the eleven processes began opening up over time in Peenya, gathering specificity and momentum. The semester was designed this time around understanding student interests and supporting each of their practices accordingly. They each gathered data and information specific to their inclinations such as: creating colour palettes of Peenya, photographing residues, mapping people and conversations, sketching the scrapyard, finding abandoned spaces, and creating narratives around found objects.
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Gearing up for production In February, students proposed their new or iterated ideas for the metro station. Ideas once again revolved largely around community based projects, narrative on Peenya and manipulation of the space. Students chose one of two modes to work. Some worked on process-intensive projects, and those who were undertaking material and fabrication intensive projects focused on intensive material explorations targeted at their final-outcome. The former experimented with multiple smaller interventions in different sites before framing their final intervention in Peenya, while the latter focused on a single idea and a consolidated form that they would prototype, refine and execute at the station.
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In the meanwhile, Ample Technologies expressed interest in supporting Art in Transit, and would eventually become the primary supporters through their CSR initiative of this education and community-based public art project. Their faith and generosity played a significant role in the realisation of the metro station as it currently stands. The semester proceeded with testing materials, creating interventions and prototyping works. Many smaller projects took place in sites around Peenya outside the metro station, thereby building a relationship with the community around the station. Between April and June students consolidated their learnings and projects were fabricated and installed in the station. Given the promise of funding, students who had graduated in the previous semester returned to implement their ideas at the station.
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FINAL FABRICATION Realizing the projects Backed with a fairly detailed semester’s worth of process, students now began executing their projects at the station. Preparing for this involved gaining approvals from the BMRCL at every level. From concepts to site and structural modification, we worked intensely with Mr. Vasanth Rao, Ms.Chitra, the architect of the station, and Mr. Shameer Basha, the structural consultant to the Metro. Scaffolding was set up for the muralists who began painting on site. Fabricators - metal workers, carpenters, welders - were hired to assist the material project students realize their ideas on site.
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A THIRD SEMESTER New Project Students The third semester of Art in Transit was largely a finishing semester for Peenya station. With a project of this scale, there were several loose ends to tie up. Pending work from the previous semester was completed and AIT alumni returned to finalize/execute/consummate their projects at site. Three new project students came on board to engage with Peenya as a testing ground, to understand the realities of working in an active public site as they formulated and executed ideas specific to Peenya.
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PDP Course: Be the City With Art in Transit having graduated into a lab space at the institute, it was now able to engage not only with final year project students, but also with second and third year students by conducting studio courses. “Be the City� was one such course that AIT ran for five weeks in September-October 2015. The course provided the students access to Peenya station as a live site to engage with and respond to. The course had students engaging with themes of city, place and public space in the form of readings and small exercises such as collaborative drawing, miniexhibitions and curations, narrative development, mapping and metaphor generation. The course ended with each student conceptualizing and executing permanent small-scale interventions in the station. These interventions ranged from working on small-scale murals to creating stencils and illustrations to working with automobile scrap.
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THE PROJECTS
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The Peenya Pilot was more than just a curation of space, more than just a response to context. What defined this project was the diversity of ideas and processes, by virtue of the fact that AIT facilitated graduating Srishti students through their diploma projects. This pilot has been just as much of a personal journey for each of AIT’s individual artists as their concepts and processes have expanded and deepened over the last year. This section charts the trajectory of each of the final projects that made it to the metro station.
PROJECTS BY THEME
social behaviour
furniture
Interaction & Play
social experiments
rest/recreation
Skew Natasha Sharma
Undulating Planes Harleen Chatha
furniture
movement
architecture/extrapolation
Wires & Walls Veda Thozhur Kolleri
repetition/reflection
Step by Step Prateek Vatash
Structural Manipulation
anamorphism
extrapolation
This section is structured not just to document the various projects but also to provide traces of the various cross-conversations that took place between them.
While You’re Waiting Siddhanth Shetty
movement
With the sharing and cross-pollination that AIT’s collaborative environment fosters, there are several links and overlaps in ideas, enquiries and processes. Throughout their engagement with the project, our artists discuss, share and build off of each other’s enquiries, leading to a set of projects that form a dynamic and diverse web of perspectives and responses to a single context.
Synergy Ria Bajaj social behaviour
Given that the project was structured so as to allow for individual responses to site, Peenya houses installations that explore a diversity of conceptual themes. The projects engage with site and place and various different levels, from those that manipulate and extrapolate physical structures, to those that provide opportunities for interaction between people; from those that engage closely with the Peenya’s local communities and landscape, to those that deal with broader ideas of the city, development and urbanization.
When Objects Breathe Jaivardhan Channey
architecture/extrapolation
Control of the Void Manush John
Stories Behind the Door Devika Shah
social constructs/human behaviour
movement
Colours of Peenya Aroushka Jinelle D’mello colour profiling
See Peenya Akshaya Elizabeth Zachariah
surrounding elements traces/porosity
Local Community
conversations journalling
Sonder Deepti Ramakrishnan
community gathering surrounding elements residues
Breaking Barriers Shail Suneja
industry
industry
A Translation of Reality Ishita Biswas
A Migration of Residues Fabrice Grolaire
urbanization/journey urbanization/journey
The Great Indian Meal Shambhavi Singh
Cityscapes & Urbanization
industrialization
The Stasis Syndicate Reuben Samson
decay
industry
development dystopia
Walled Visions Raj Palan
The Lilliput Proletariat Ruchika Nambiar
2
EXTERNAL
3
1 4
5
PROJECTS BY LOCATION
6
1
Wires & Walls Veda Thozhur Kolleri
2
A Migration of Residues Fabrice Grolaire
3
Walled Visions Raj Palan
4
Stories Behind the Door Devika Shah
12
Jitni Mann Ki Daud Shambhavi Singh
5
Breaking Barriers Shail Suneja
13
Colours of Peenya Aroushka Jinelle D’mello
6
Undulating Planes Harleen Chatha
14
Control of the Void Manush John
7
A Translation of Reality Ishita Biswas
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The Stasis Syndicate Reuben Samson
8
The Lilliput Proletariat Ruchika Nambiar
16
While You’re Waiting Siddhanth Shetty
9
Skew Natasha Sharma
17
Synergy Ria Bajaj
10
See Peenya 18 Akshaya Elizabeth Zachariah
When Objects Breathe Jaivardhan Channey
A
Permanent
11
Step by Step Prateek Vatash
Sonder Deepti Ramakrishnan
A
Temporary/Ephemeral
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PLATFORM 14
15 16
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18 17
13
CONCOURSE 12 11 10 16
GROUND
8 9
7
How can people come out of their own little bubbles of personal space? Ria Bajaj
Interaction & Play
Taking off from the idea of vulnerability, I was viewing the physical wall as representative of the walls that we build around ourselves, and I drew on it everything that it hid, as if to bring the wall down, and to question the need for such walls. Veda Thozhur Kolleri
Structural Manipulation
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VEDA THOZHUR KOLLERI Artist. vedathozhurkolleri.tumblr.com darth.veda904@gmail.com Veda Thozhur Kolleri uses the tools of drawing and writing to develop her understanding of various human phenomena. Her enquiries are of a basic but fundamental nature: to understand why things are the way they are, whether it’s understanding the way people think and behave individually or collectively, and then further understanding how their environments are shaped by their thoughts, be it in the activities they choose to engage in, or the physical spaces they create and inhabit. As such, Veda’s practice involves observation of people and spaces, and she documents, reflects upon and draws inferences from her observations through the act of drawing and writing.
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WIRES & WALLS Veda Thozhur Kolleri A mural that manipulates the existing dimensions and architectural elements of its site. Timeline July 2014 - July 2015 Site Main entrance wall Media Paint
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Veda has, from the beginning, used drawing as a way to negotiate with spaces and their inhabitants. She attempts to identify singular elements that can explain larger phenomena – whether it’s the individuals that make up crowds or the physical elements that make up space. Her early explorations in Peenya took her to the various community pockets around the station where she used drawing as a tool to document, reflect as well as engage with the people in the community. She began making drawings of the people and the spaces there and leaving these drawings behind on walls in the community, allowing the people to engage with them directly and add to them if they wished. In the station, Veda began making portraits of the security guards on the walls, something that has continued to remain in the station throughout and has very much contributed to our acceptance in the station. Through the act of portrait making, she began narrowing in on the idea of vulnerability and the different ways in which it played out in public space. This theme has continued through all of Veda’s work until the end, even when she transitioned from working with people to working with physical spaces. Veda performed several iterative experiments, both in and around Peenya as well as outside of it. From eavesdropping and recording conversations between strangers to using charcoal drawings to expose the structures behind parapet walls, she began exploring the different ways in which vulnerability manifested in people’s daily engagements. In her final piece at the station, ‘Windows in Underground Tanks’, she chose the entire length of the station’s entrance wall to work with. As she sketched and understood the site, she found herself drawn primarily to the forms of the windows. An important aspect of Veda’s practice was that she responded to site directly onsite, she did not formulate a final 48
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drawing or visualisation on paper that she would then proceed to impose onto site. She did however make several exploratory drawings to understand the trajectory she would like to follow while engaging with this site. All these explorations attempted to mock the scale of these large architectural structures and what they stood for, by playing with and muting their existing dimensions while creating and imposing upon them entirely new and different dimensions. Given the accretive nature of her process, one can see the nature of her visual language evolving as she moved from one end of the wall to the other, at first manipulating existing architectural structures while eventually transitioning into adding atmosphere to the space and using a visual language that made it seem like she might be stripping away the hard concrete of the walls and exposing the inner flesh of the station. The piece was completed over the course of three months.
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FABRICE GROLAIRE Graphic Artist. hellofabrice@hotmail.fr A graphic artist with a bold and distinctive style, Fabrice Grolaire was formally trained as a product designer, first in France, and then in Bangalore at Srishti, indulging in graffiti and street art as only a hobby. Fabrice used Art in Transit as a space to seriously explore forms of graphic art in public spaces, finding Bangalore a far more conducive environment for public art than his hometown in France. Taking to walls with ease, Fabrice conceptualises and executes murals by drawing inspiration from elements within the context of his site, creating graphic compositions that he then executes with his preferred medium of spray paint. Whether in his sketches, drawings or murals, Fabrice’s style is strongly inspired by the aesthetic of graffiti art, comprising of bold lines, forms and colours, representing his themes in a striking yet playful manner.
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The relationship between ‘creature-creator’ is, for me, the link between the station and the scrapyard. Is there a cycle of birth and death for every new construction? How could I connect these two spaces? Fabrice Grolaire
Cityscapes & Urbanization
Crumbling structures and abandoned institutions positioned alongside aspirational constructions emphasize the sense of transience. The prevalent corrosion was not however indicative of environmental brutality, but a subtle allusion to the idea of progress necessitating disintegration. Reuben Samson
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A MIGRATION OF RESIDUES Fabrice Grolaire A mural that reanimates elements from Peenya’s scrapyard in the form of mechanical creatures. Timeline Jan 2015 - July 2015 Site External West-facing wall Media Paint
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Fabrice’s work as a graffiti artist had him responding to Peenya with a very clear and consistent graphic language. From his earliest drawings and sketches to his final mural at the station, his formal trajectory has followed a straight path of evolution and growth. Exploring the Peenya scrapyard early on his semester, he found the structures in the space resonating with him and forming a strong source of inspiration. As he began caricaturizing elements from the scrapyard in the form of anthropomorphic drawings, he began dwelling upon the relationship between the station and the scrapyard. He began drawing parallels with birth and death cycles and parent-child relationships, observing the necessity for the scrapyard to disintegrate and fall into disuse as the station itself matured and developed. His early explorations in the scrapyard had him creating photo collages that seemed like they were piecing together elements from the scrapyard to create animate forms. It was this exercise that formed the basis of his final project as he decided to reanimate these dormant elements from the scrapyard in the form of mechanical creatures in the station, offering these elements a final migration to the place they were originally intended for. His process involved closely studying and sketching the elements in the scrapyard and then composing them into whimsical creatures. He did this alongside making sketches of his site – the entire Western wall of the station – and understanding where his creatures could be positioned in relation to the architecture of the site as well as in relation to one another. After creating final rendered drawings of his various creatures, he proceeded to digitally impose them upon a photograph of the site and iterate various colour palettes digitally. The final piece was created onsite over a month and a half and executed with spray paints. The piece is one that can be seen from the road, the highway and the metro as one approaches the station from the West.
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On the face of it, Peenya displays an almost robotic kind of behavior. People go to the same place for the same purpose every day. The highway is as busy as it can get. You can see everything that you’d expect to see in an industrial area: vehicles, machinery, businesses, people. It looks as busy as a fully functional circuit board. Shail Suneja
Cityscapes & Urbanization
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Local Community
As I explored and researched Peenya, my drawings all started weaving around themes of industrialization and transportation. Raj Palan
RAJ PALAN Visual Artist. behance.net/rajpalan rp1231@gmail.com An avid illustrator, Raj Palan finds his interests travelling across various different forms and media, from cartooning to character design to comics and graphic novels. Occasionally working with graphic design & typography as well, Raj’s work employs a bold and playful aesthetic, much like his illustrations. He has now begun venturing from sketchbook to walls, exploring the form of murals in public spaces. He finds the form liberating in that he is able to exercise creative control while still sharing his ideas in public. His work often deals with understanding elements that make up a context and personifying them in the form of playful creatures, monsters or people.
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WALLED VISIONS Raj Palan A mural that personifies industrialization as whimsical monsters. Timeline July 2014 - July 2015 Site External back wall Media Paint
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Raj’s project has centred around his practice of drawing and illustration. Being someone that usually preferred to stick to his sketch book, Raj found the act of mural making to be liberating in that he could still continue to exercise creative authority in what he chose to draw, but at the same time be able to share it with the rest of the world. The wall for him was a sketch book of a different sort. Raj’s explorations in Peenya and the drawings that resulted began revolving around themes of industrialization, transportation and the contrasts between natural and industrial, rigid and playful, organic and inorganic. Creating several illustrations inspired by Peenya’s industrial landscape, he then chose a site upon which to paint his mural: the back wall of the station. When he began his first piece for the September exhibition, he chose to personify industrial machinery and juxtapose them with playful monsters and creatures. His image also began connecting to existing structures on the building. When Raj returned the next semester, he began iterating upon a mural that would connect to the first one and be painted on the adjacent wall. With a preliminary visualisation of a young boy releasing imaginary monsters from a jack-in-thebox, he took to the wall and began realizing the piece onsite. The piece was executed onsite over the course of a month, with its bright colours and playful forms attracting several interested people. The impact Raj’s visuals have and the sense of play and enjoyment they bring with them entices people and encourages them to interact and engage with the station.
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DEVIKA SHAH Space Artist. Furniture Designer. storiesbehindthedoor.blogspot.in devika.shah@hotmail.com Having primarily studied space and furniture design, with Art in Transit, Devika Shah’s practice began transitioning into a more fluid engagement with spaces and structures through image making. Through the act of painting onsite, she creates compositions that interact with physical sites and are influenced by them. And in return, she manipulates the realities of these physical spaces by playing with and extrapolating their existing lines, forms, colours, shadows and perspectives through the image she imposes upon the site. As such, her murals exploit a number of different surfaces that make up her site, from the walls to the floor to doors and windows, to the roads and pavements.
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I started analyzing this aspect of spatial elements - like doors - contributing more to a space than just being a wooden piece that allows one to walk in and walk out. Just like the stories, every door had its own character. It provided individuality. The colors, the wood, the garland that hung. Devika Shah
Structural Manipulation
Local Community
Peenya has a very dull and pale tonal association, dominated with browns, beiges and greys which would be accentuated with sudden appearances of bright colour in vastu themed houses, painted carts and trucks and bright blouses worn by the women in this society. These sudden contrasts became the basis of my colour study. Aroushka Jinelle D’mello
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STORIES BEHIND THE DOOR Devika Shah A mural that manipulates and extends the existing lines and forms of the stairs. Timeline July 2014 - July 2015 Site External back wall Media Paint
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Devika’s explorations in Peenya began with her interactions with a small community pocket in Peenya, popularly dubbed “S10”. Coming from a background of space and furniture design, what piqued Devika’s interest were the structures that made up these community spaces, specifically the doors and entrances. It wasn’t just the physicality of these elements, but rather the stories and experiences they could convey, through their colours, forms and textures. Her early intervention ideas involved integrating 3D structures with 2D imagery and given her intention to play with structure, she gravitated towards using the floor as a canvas and have her 3D forms emerge out of an image on the floor. Eventually, she abandoned the idea of using 3D forms and began concentrating on the possibilities of floor paintings. Imposing an image upon the floor allowed it to have multiple entry points unlike an image one might view straight up on a wall. It allowed a different relationship to lines and perspectives. Devika continued this exploration with floor paintings into her second semester, this time not just thinking of her piece as a single consolidated installation within the station, but trying to understand how she could nuance and complicate an audience’s interaction with a floor painting. She went back to the S10 community, this time not with the intent of collecting fodder for an image, but instead making the image in the space itself and having the community interact with her image. Devika performed three such experiments at S10, one working off of surrounding structures, the next using surround colours and the third painting shadows for objects in the area, testing her ability to respond to different aspects of space and understanding where she wished to situate her practice. Through a collaborative mural in Yelahanka with classmate Ishita Biswas, she also had the opportunity to merge some of her techniques and ideas with Ishita’s, creating a piece that was not only a commentary on space and structure and physical elements, but also a commentary on social and cultural dynamics of an urban space.
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Devika’s final mural at the Peenya metro station travels across the back wall of the station as she tries to engage with various different architectural elements: the walls, the doors, the stairs, the railings and the pavement. Her piece extends existing forms and lines, twists and warps them, transitions them into a more vibrant colour palette and has them bleed out onto different surfaces across her site.
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SHAIL SUNEJA Industrial Artist. behance.net/shailsunejd045 shailsuneja@gmail.com Having dabbled in product and space design, and with a keen interest in hands-on work, Shail Suneja’s practice has most frequently dealt with sustainability and ecological building, emphasizing on the use of natural, indigenous materials that forge a direct link between that which is built and the natural context within which it is situated. As a result, his work, instead of imposing form upon material, allows material to dictate form. Whether it comes to understanding the properties of natural materials or the functioning of manmade machinery, Shail’s practice advocates a close introspection of our physical world in order to inform our interventions such that they are integrated with context rather than imposed upon it.
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I liked the concept of the body being seen as city, which we are in total control of. How we abuse or please the city depends on us, and the outcomes of it reflect on our lives. There is constant motion and change within us at every moment, and it is up to us to decide the direction we should take it in. Prateek Vatash
Cityscapes & Urbanization
Interaction & Play
My audience was going to be in motion all the time, and so my form could not be static. When I say this I mean that my form could not be visually stationary. It needed to keep changing with respect to the movement of the traffic. Shail Suneja
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BREAKING BARRIERS Shail Suneja A 3D mesh sculpture portraying the breaking away of physical barriers. Timeline July 2014 - July 2015 Site External triangular space Media Metal mesh
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Across the span of two semesters, Shail’s ideas have travelled from literal to abstract, from narrative-intensive to material-intensive. However, a unifying theme across these ideas was what he perceived to be a robotic monotony in the way in which people in Peenya engaged with their locality. His trajectory across the year can best be summarized as a shift from wanting to represent this monotony to wanting to intervene in it. While first dabbling with the idea of wanting to represent Peenya’s history in the form of a synoptic mural, Shail probed deeper until he was able to understand and articulate for himself the core intention behind what he wished to do at the station: to introduce an element of surprise that could cause a break in one’s regular routine, causing one to reassess the given site with fresh new perspective. Given that he wished to address a certain monotony in people’s daily routines and motions, he chose an audience that best symbolized this type of monotony: vehicular traffic. Zeroing in on a triangular patch of land underneath the metro flyover locked between three busy roads, he was able to capitalize on a site that had high visibility and was therefore ideal for a visual spectacle. He then proceeded to understand his site through play. Photographing the site from various angles and sketching playful intervention ideas directly over them, allowing him to arrive at the basic idea of exploring soft forms through hard materials. Through several iterations around form, material and method of construction, Shail arrived at the use of metal mesh to create large, flowing ribbon-like forms that would seem like they were flying away and wrapping around the beams of the building, to symbolize the breaking away of barriers. Finalizing the design of the piece involved a long process of modifying the details of its construction – the size and distance of outward projection from the beam, the type of mesh, the nature of its outer framework and the details of its suspension – based on several consultations with the BMRCL’s chief structural engineer and the metal fabricators. The construction itself involved the bending of MS pipes to create the outer framework of each of the ribbon-like forms and then bending and welding the mesh onto the frames. The final four pieces were then painted and hoisted up onto the beams using a hydraulic crane.
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How do we integrate the station with its surroundings and have the occupants become living extensions of the station? Akshaya Zachariah
Local Community
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Interaction & Play
By giving them a space to be themselves, we can be an encouraging catalyst that allows them to venture more into that space - use it, talk about it, bring friends/family to the space and replace their negative associations with positive ones. Harleen Chatha
HARLEEN CHATHA Furniture Designer. Installation Artist. behance.net/MissQuinn harleen@me.com Harleen Chatha’s interests are wide and varied, ranging from furniture design, installation art, mural painting, writing, Lomography and sculpting. All her work, while utilitarian in some form, combines a strong aspect of play, making her practice an equal mix of both art and design. She likes to put herself within a tangible context to respond to and her installations are often interactive, concerned with creating immersive experiences. Also a very visual person, her installations explore interesting, abstracted and highly graphic forms, lines and patterns with bold colour play.
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UNDULATING PLANES Harleen Chatha A winding sculptural furniture piece that portrays a creature emerging from underground Timeline July 2014 - July 2015 Site External Triangular Space Media Bent MS Pipes
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Harleen’s two semesters at Art in Transit have revolved around a consistent site at the metro station: a poorly accessible triangular patch of land underneath the metro flyover, locked between three high-traffic roads. Harleen spent her first month in Peenya interviewing several people who lived in the area, and the appeal this particular site held was that it was able to act as somewhat of a symbol for how the people in Peenya perceived the metro station – daunting and inaccessible. While her ideas across the year have taken different forms, they’ve all focused on the goal of using this site to create a less intimidating entry point into the station for the people of Peenya. Coming up with several different approaches to intervening in this space, towards the end of her first semester, Harleen’s ideas began transitioning into public furniture that could double as a ‘jungle gym’. She began working through the metaphor of the ‘underbelly’ and visualized her furniture pieces as abstracted insects and other such creatures. Among several ideas and sketches of different types of creatures, she began refining and resolving the details of one of the forms: a winding worm-like form composed of bent rings. As she began developing this form and creating small scale prototypes with wire, its potential for repetition and adaptation became apparent and she decided it was of merit to expand this form to inhabit the entire space. She tried various ways of visualizing this total site inhabitation, through repetition, variation in thickness, size and positioning, using digital renders, hand drawn sketches and a few onsite experiments. Working with a local metal fabrication unit in Peenya, she decided to test the fabrication process by creating a to-scale prototype of the smallest form by bending MS pipes. This having turned out fairly successful, she began working with the fabricators to create the remaining three pieces that would make up the entire worm form. Parallel to this process, Harleen also
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began considering feedback she had received during her juries to landscape the area around her piece, given that it was a poorly maintained area that was uneven and unappealing to use. In order to landscape this patch of land, Art in Transit collaborated with DesignEarth, a studio that specialized in ecological design and natural building. DesignEarth landscaped the area as well as facilitated the installation of the sculptural pieces in the ground. The piece was finally spray painted in shades of blue and green and travelled onto the wall as well, in the form of a mural.
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ISHITA BISWAS Illustrator. ishitabiswas.tumblr.com ishitabiswas89@gmail.com Having found her initial approach of social activism to be narrow and onedimensional, Ishita Biswas has since begun trying to translate and simplify the phenomena she observes around her, in attempt to better understand them for herself and further share her understanding with others. Observing and communicating through drawing and illustration, she talks about human life and urban conditions by summarizing them in the form of symbolic interpretations that she uses as a way to start a dialogue with people. As such, drawing is an important means in her process, as well as its end.
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I started drawing in order to observe and understand the tangible and intangible characteristics of space. Here, drawing was also acting like a shield to resist my awkwardness as an outsider. IshIta Biswas
Local Community
Cityscapes & Urbanization
It was through the act of drawing portraits of strangers that I grew conscious of us -- myself and my subjects -- having to let go of our feelings of vulnerability in order to be able to sit through these drawing sessions that involved extended periods of eye contact. Veda Thozhur Kolleri
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TRANSLATION OF REALITY Ishita Biswas A mural that visually summarizes an urban traveler’s experience. Timeline July 2014 - July 2015 Site Wall above ticket counter Media Paint
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Ishita Biswas’s project has developed through her practice of drawing in public spaces. Through her two semesters at Art in Transit, she has approached the act of drawing in different ways, stretching and testing its possibilities and limitations. She first began engaging with Peenya by drawing portraits of people from the community, a medium that helped her interact more easily with them. But she soon shifted her focus to drawing scenes and elements from the environment that she found were exciting her. Approaching the act of drawing largely instinctively, her work began echoing themes of development, aspirations and lifestyle. She narrowed in on elements that could be symbolic of these larger themes, choosing to isolate and draw such elements such that one could gauge the social and cultural information encoded within these objects even once removed from context. From exploring themes around water and its consumption, Ishita soon started transitioning into representing themes around construction and urban aspirations. Her practice has been characterized by her relationship between drawing onsite and drawing in studio, and understanding what benefits each has to offer her. She would observe site, creating more experiential atmospheric sketches, while in studio time, she’d begin simplifying these down and reducing them to basic symbolic elements that could capture the essence of that atmosphere. Ishita did a number of murals in different places, including a collaborative piece with classmate Devika Shah before arriving upon her final intervention at Peenya. For her final piece at the station, Ishita chose to work with a large and iconic wall in the station with multiple viewpoints. She did not want to view her
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intervention in isolation but instead think of it as one among the many experiences a person would have while transiting through the station. To this end, she began the process of studying what this journey to and from the station was like, taking to the road, the train and the highway and understanding the different approaches to the station. She made sketches during her journeys, recorded videos and then used those videos as fodder while creating drawings in her studio time. Elements such as the handrail, the escalators, the flyovers began recurring in her sketches and she began simplifying the experience of the journey down to a few elements that could capture the essence of the entire journey. After iterating a few versions of what was to finally go on the wall, she began painting fullscale sections of it to test her hand before finally beginning the piece on the wall. The mural was completed over five weeks.
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I was thinking about how the metro represents everything the city and even the country is moving towards. When the entire city is journeying towards goals of success and dreams of an advanced and better developed life, does the traveller have time to pause and reflect on these aspirations? Shambhavi Singh
Cityscapes & Urbanization
My intention wasn’t necessarily to portray Peenya as undeniably dystopian, but rather to obscure our understandng of it. By pitting our familiar, recognizable forms of “progress� against a dystopian exaggeration of Peenya, is it possible to make our ideas around development seem strange and alien even to ourselves? Ruchika Nambiar
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RUCHIKA NAMBIAR Narrative Artist. ruchikanambiar.com ruchika.vn@gmail.com Ruchika Nambiar’s practice focuses on framing and conveying ideas through the use of narrative as a subtle tool of persuasion as well as a tool for packaging large amounts of detail. Her projects often incorporate whimsy and playfulness in an attempt to ease her audience into a space where they are more receptive to new ideas. While her ideas are often expressed in the context of personal experiences and stories, the larger themes they explore are connected to her interests in socio-cultural evolution and human behaviour. Drawn towards forms that provide possibilities for detailed narratives, her work involves book making, creative writing, image making and illustration, graphic design and occasionally diorama-making.
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THE LILLIPUT PROLETARIAT Ruchika Nambiar A 2D cutout diorama that weaves a dystopian tale around Peenya Timeline July 2014 - Dec 2015 Site Ground floor Media 2D Cut Out Diorama
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Ruchika found it challenging to process Peenya’s industrial landscape at first, given that it was vastly different from cityscapes that were familiar to us and had none of the usual markers through which people revealed themselves. There weren’t the usual markers of identity, aspirations or human activity. With the deserted roads and overgrown pavements, the area gave off a distinctly dystopian vibe, forming the basis of her project. Given that a very familiar kind of development – high rise apartments, malls, the metro – was taking place just at the fringes of this industrial area, she wished to speculate upon this idea of Peenya turning into a kind of unchanging bubble as the city around it continued to develop.
Presence of mind is the essence of safety Issued in public interest by the Ministry of Dreamscapes
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She wished to exaggerate existing elements in Peenya and weave a dystopian story around it, pitting this dystopia against a projected utopia of what we picture a fully developed urban landscape to be. She created a base narrative that would then be explored and expanded upon in the form of a miniature diorama. She began her process of composing the scenes, using elements from Peenya such as the trucks, the tea stalls, the buildings and industries, the metro station itself, and repurposing them to fit new roles within her story. For its utopian counterpart, she began drawing from imagery in commercial advertisements that symbolized urban aspirations and gave tangible form to how we imagined concepts such as progress, development and happiness. The details of this story began resolving themselves in the process of understanding how social and political systems and hierarchies worked within this whimsical world she was creating. Initially planning for this to take the form of a 3D diorama, she iterated upon different methods of creating these miniatures, primarily using printed and lasercut pieces to be assembled into 3D forms and using a host of miscellaneous materials for inorganic elements. Prototyping a version of this 3D diorama however concluded that it would require a lot more time to establish cohesion in the aesthetic language of the diorama and she switched to considering the form of a 2D layered diorama, made entirely out of lasercut pieces layered together to create
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“Peenya had remained frozen in time. It was an alien town. So much so that the Metro rail that had once transported industrial workers to work everyday had now devolved into a joyride, allowing the people outside to get a glimpse of this strange land that was Peenya.”
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“Enamoured as it was by the seductive notion of perfection, lives were now scripted, romance was now engineered, people were now created and conditioned to play out prewritten scenes and stories over and over.”
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a composite image. Her process then shifted to creating this composite image digitally to narrate her story. She composed two images that would be assembled back to back in an aquariumlike display case. The images became synoptic narratives that could be dissected and analysed in order to arrive at the larger story behind them. The piece would, by virtue of using miniature forms, compel its audience to come closer and examine the details. The images were designed such that they could be processed at various different levels; one could take away only a portion of the story at any given point of time and discover something new in it with each repeated viewing. The digital image was broken up into discrete individual components that were then printed on board and lasercut. The lasercut pieces were then assembled and stuck together manually, creating one large two-sided composite piece that fit into its glass case. p86.
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NATASHA SHARMA Industrial Artist. 94natasha.sharma@gmail.com Natasha Sharma situates her practice at the crossroads of art and design. Her outcomes are a combination of artistic instincts translated through design methodology to cater to the public in various forms. Drawing from an eclectic pool of interests, she has worked in several different media, from product and furniture design to packaging to graphic art and illustration to installation art. Natasha has recently begun focusing her practice on the dimension of tactility, narrowing in on product, furniture and object making. The themes she engages with lean towards interactivity and play, material research and development, social experiments and story telling.
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The movement of a commuter can be suspended through changes in his or her perception. Perception is subliminal and extremely distinctive and unique to oneself. It proves to be a limitation, as it influences the mind and vice versa. Natasha Sharma
Structural Manipulation
Interaction & Play
Body language in its various expressions is understood long before we are formally introduced to the other language forms. One can make use of this intrinsic knowledge to communicate to a public. Manush John
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SKEW /skju:/ to move obliquely
Natasha Sharma A mirror installation that tracks movement along the stairs Timeline July 2015 - Dec 2015 Site Ground floor stairs Media Glass mirror
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Natasha entered Peenya after there were a significant number of artworks and projects already in place. As such, she was responding to a site that had already accommodated one set of responses, and hers was therefore a process that was aware of the successes and trials already experienced by other artists in the station. At this point, impact was still something we had not quite achieved inside the station, with the artworks seeming disconnected and leaving the space still perceptibly vast and empty. Natasha centred her project around bringing impact into the station. She explored the ground floor for possible sites, and given that she was interested in working with light, reflection and colour, the two mirrored staircases proved an interesting site for her. Given that the two sets of stairs were a reflection of each other, she found added symbolism and significance in the idea of using mirrors as her medium. She began iterating around the idea of placing pieces of mirror on the vertical surfaces of the steps. She ran a few experiments with rectangular pieces of acrylic mirror to understand the various effects she could achieve with mirror on the steps and found the possibilities vast and exciting. Having decided on her basic medium, she began thinking through form and spent several days studying the site and understanding how the existing realities of the site could inform her form. Documenting the site with timelapse videos, she noticed a fairly consistent
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pattern emerging in the way people ascended and descended the stairs. Given the way people turned a corner on each floor in order to ascend or descend the stairs, they invariably started at the same point and followed an almost identical path across the stairs.
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Through her photographs she began marking these paths the commuters used and simplified it down to a few lines that could largely summarize the basic movement up and down the stairs. She then proceeded to recreate this path using square pieces of mirror and lining them up to create different lengths of rectangular strips along the steps. The piece was created with over 600 individual pieces of mirror, all installed using mirror mount double sided tape. The beauty of the piece is that it is just as much of a subtle interaction as it is a visual spectacle. Those who descend the stairs, unaware of the mirrors, unwittingly follow its path, while those ascending get to witness this interaction and consciously follow the path of mirrors upstairs.
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The things that caught my eye were the cracks on the walls, the ash remains on the makeshift stoves, the polished white school shoes. How could I make the walls of the station porous and bring these traces and experiences inside the station? Akshaya Zachariah
Local Community
How could I present my interactions with the community of Peenya in a way that did not summarize, did not simplify this complex and dynamic web of life? How could I recreate a lived experience as opposed to simply document it? Deepti Ramakrishnan
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AKSHAYA ZACHARIAH Visual Artist. Photographer. Muralist. behance.net/AkshayaElizabeth93 akshayalizak@gmail.com Through her journey of developing her practice, Akshaya Zachariah has explored several different forms of visual media: from graphite to charcoal to watercolours to illustration to photography to muraling. Her work evolves from medium to medium as she combines various techniques to suit her needs. Her work tries to capture the essence of daily life, recording conversations, activities, spaces, textures, colours and several other forms through which daily life evidences itself, and further translating these elements into artistic forms that can then re-evoke the experience itself. As such, her work involves observation through drawing and photography, and interaction with people, the spaces they inhabit and the activities they engage in.
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SEE PEENYA Ashaya Zachariah A multimedia, multi-site installation that brings elements from Peenya into the station. Timeline July 2014 - July 2015 Site Concourse Media ACP and Vinyl prints
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From the beginning, Akshaya’s engagement with Peenya has revolved around capturing and recording traces of life and human activity. Her interests in Peenya have moved from human gestures to food and local vendors to truck art to visual media found in the area, but all of them have been consistent in that they are signs and clues through which people reveal a way of life. Initially wishing to create a map in the station that would point out local food vendors and stalls, she eventually broadened her ideas to include more things from the environment that excited her. p96.
She began recording Peenya through photo walks, capturing people, buildings, activities, textures, colours and residues. While deciding upon how these elements would manifest in the station, she began thinking of the porosity of the walls and their ability to start filtering in elements from the outside, recreating bits of the outside experience on the inside. Thinking through this idea, she began thinking of the station as a compass, where each wall surface could bring in elements from the spaces behind that surface. As such, she divided Peenya into four phases: the industrial southern face, the apartment complexes to the north of the station, the food stalls and vendors to the east and the community pockets to the west. She then began creating visualisations of elements and textures from these different phases that could then replicate themselves on the corresponding walls inside the station. p97.
Her project used photography as a primary tool, capturing people, buildings and textures that she then digitally edited and had printed in various forms that could enter the station. Her final project in the station included ACP printed cut outs of children playing cricket and hide-and-seek, representing the community phase, vinyl prints of brick and cement textures that represented the industrial phase, and half tone vinyl stickers that went on glass windows in the station mimicking bakery and food store fronts. Her curation of the various pieces targetted a commuter’s 2-minute walk through the concourse, placing the pieces such that they could be stumbled upon, and using the medium of photography such that they could be mistaken for real on first glance.
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PRATEEK VATASH Graphic Artist. prateekÂv.tumblr.com prateekvatash@gmail.com A skilled graphic artist and designer with a distinctive style, Prateek Vatash’s work ranges from typography to publication design to illustration. With a striking visual language that plays with bold neon colour palettes and strong, clean lines and forms, he creates dynamic and engaging visual compositions. His work effortlessly combines several forms such as clean vector art, 3D elements, digital typography, photography, graphic patterns and optical illusions, found media and handwritten type. Thematically, his work ranges from the whimsical to the abstract, weaving in elements that evidence his interest in the occult and in semiotics.
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The stairs are an interesting space, because it can be seen in from two distinct different viewpoints: while climbing up, and coming down. They could function in a way similar to how lenticular screens work, allowing two different images to be present in the space. Prateek Vatash
Structural Manipulation
Interaction & Play
While observing the ground floor, I looked at the symmetry that existed at the site. The stairs on one side of the station were an exact reflection of the other, and given the already lenticular nature of the stairs, it provided an opportunity for play. Natasha Sharma
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STEP BY STEP Prateek Vatash An anamorphic illusion on the stairs. Timeline July 2014 - July 2015 Site Concourse stairs Media Spray paint
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Prateek’s trajectory through Art in Transit has been very much in keeping with his practice as an artist. His consistent engagement with bold lines, colours, forms and typography immediately had him assessing the metro station and the possibilities its structure offered for a visual spectacle. He very naturally gravitated towards the large staircases as a possible canvas for an intervention. Stairs provided two distinctly different vantage points – one while walking up the stairs and the other while descending down. They could function similar to lenticular screens and this provided interesting opportunities for an image on the stairs. Working around basic ideas of transition and change, he began exploring images that could change and shift based on a viewer’s position relative to the stairs, making the piece an interactive one. From sketching out basic ideas, he moved onto iterating through paper and digital 3D models to understand the physicality of site and how movement and position affected the image being viewed. He began testing his ideas onsite with the very simple technique of sticking post-its on the steps to understand how lines and forms might change based on the viewer’s position. For the September exhibition, Prateek iterated upon forms that could be executed
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using reflective tape, testing out an image that would align itself to form a cube only once the viewer was standing directly in front of the stairs. Post the exhibition, he iterated upon several possible images and shapes that could be executed using tape and would come together in the form of lines. However, after testing out the effectiveness of spray paints on the granite steps, he realized he could expand his iterations to include solid forms instead of just lines, eventually settling upon a flowing form that curved its way up the stairs. The challenge was to achieve the illusion of those curves on the broken, angular canvas the stairs provided. Using tape to mark off his image’s boundaries and with two coats of paint, Prateek’s piece on the stairs currently stands as a vibrant fourcolour wave that climbs its way up the stairs to the platform.
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What is this experience of life, being in a space defined by geographic boundaries and then being in a place, defined by purposes, memories, and relationships? Our journeys are more often than not spent in a kind of sleep, where we want to avoid the monotony of travel and just reach the destination. Shambhavi Singh
Cityscapes & Urbanization
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I could no longer see my site in isolation, and I wished for my work to become part of the experience of not only the rest of the station but also of one’s experience of journeying to and from the station. Ishita Biswas
SHAMBHAVI SINGH Storyteller. Designer. behance.net/shambhavisingh shambhavi990@gmail.com Shambhavi Singh uses art and design as a tool for inquiry, to understand contexts, and then build imagery that can tell a story about those contexts. Her work often makes use of characters, personification and metaphorization and her themes often revolve around the city and ideas around urbanization. Treating the city as something of a theatre production where characters have stories to tell and paths that cross, her work plays with visual narrative structures. Her practice aims to seek out existing stories that are embedded within contexts and activate them in the form of images that can trigger conversation with people.
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JITNI MANN KI DAUD Shambhavi Singh A mural that represents the rush of daily life as a breakfast table scene. Timeline July 2014 - Dec 2015 Site Wall above concourse stairs Media Paint on board
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Shambhavi found her hook fairly early on in the project and it has coloured her work in Art in Transit ever since. The writings of Kabir struck Shambhavi as being particularly relevant to her engagement with ideas around the city and urban life. As she spent time in the metro station, observing people, their movements and behavior, she found her observations consistently framed by Kabir’s ideas around transience, alienation and unbelonging. Her ideas for interventions began revolving around the rush of city life. With her observations of commuters in Peenya, she began to touch upon the aspect of being in two different places: physically being in transit, but mentally being elsewhere, never considering the space of transit to be worth pondering over. “Kabir’s analogy of the musk deer seemed to capture this idea. The musk deer, intoxicated by the smell of musk, roams around the jungle looking for it, never realizing that the musk is within his naval. This analogy seemed to resonate with the restlessness and ever increasing pace of urban life. This lay the ground for inspiration.” She began enquiring how she could create a moment of pause for the traveler and allow them to ponder upon the present moment. Primarily being an image maker, she wished to explore how an image could represent the different places, aspirations, memories and relationships that characterized one’s life. She began working through visual metaphors to build
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this image, and she finally arrived at the central theme of food. Food seemed to work at various levels; it was a basic necessity, but it was also something that had larger ideas of bonding, relationships, culture and status attached to it.
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She chose her site to be a large wall that one encountered while walking down the stairs from the platform to the concourse. It was expansive enough to claim her audience’s attention, while at the same time being positioned above an active transit space (stairs) such that they would have to pause in order to examine her image further. Her imagery started developing so as to integrate scenes of daily life with objects and elements related to food and eating. Through several iterations around form, detail and colour, Shambhavi’s final image manifested as a bustling breakfast table scene integrated with the city’s landscape. Having first composed it on paper, she proceeded to recreate this detailed image over several weeks by painting it in three sections on large 12’x18’ boards that then got installed onsite.
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AROUSHKA D’MELLO Illustrator. Graphic Designer. Photographer. behance.net/aroushka aroushka_jinelle@hotmail.com Aroushka D’mello entered the field with an interest in fine-art, working primarily with her preferred medium of watercolours. Since then, she has worked with illustration, typography and graphic design, occasionally trying her hand at curation, exhibition design, muraling, film and animation. Photography forms a big part of her practice as well, and she also engages in social media design, advertising and food reviewing. In her work, she looks for opportunities to bring several of these fields together to create a wholesome experience for her audience.
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As an industrial space, Peenya appears dull to the urban eye. Dust fills the air, concrete is left unpainted and distances are travelled in the blazing sun. A lot of what makes this community beautiful can’t be seen at first glance. Aroushka D’mello
Local Community
We see diversity in the types of houses, their different colours, the shapes of the windows, the different smaller elements that make up the experience of a space. How could one recreate such sensorial experiences inside the station? Akshaya Zachariah
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COLOURS OF PEENYA Aroushka Jinelle D’mello A PVC pipes installation that brings together colours from all around Peenya. Timeline July 2014 - July 2015 Site Cavity near concourse stairs Media PVC pipes
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Aroushka’s engagement with Peenya has always been characterized by her relationship with colour and it has informed her trajectory through this project right from the start. Her first impressions of Peenya were influenced by its predominantly dull and dusty colour palette, and her ideas during the first semester revolved around bringing colour into the metro station to contrast its stark atmosphere. However, as she delved deeper into her research, using photography as a tool, she started noticing how diverse Peenya’s colour palette truly was, with colourfully painted Vaastu houses to the women’s sari blouses to the bright blue vegetable carts. She instinctively looked for instances of colour as she explored Peenya with her camera, and started building on a photo bank that documented the various colours that truly made up the area’s visual landscape. Her project began grounding itself within context as she now focused not just on bringing colour into the station, but bringing Peenya’s colours into the station. She began creating an extensive bank of colour palettes from photographs taken at different locations across Peenya. In terms of form, she didn’t want to create a representational image, but she did want a visual piece that could be interacted
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with. For her site, she chose a long cavity that flanked the main stairway on the concourse. She decided to introduce modular coloured columns that would be hung in rows such that one’s view of the piece would keep changing as one travelled up the adjacent stairs or escalator, seeing different sets of colours at different points.
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Her final set of colours were consolidated and edited from the thirty palettes she’d compiled from her photographs. She chose to use painted PVC pipes as her material, suspending them in four rows and painting them with bands of colour. The installation itself involved consultations with the BMRCL’s structural expert, to determine the nature of suspension and support required to hang the pipes. Aroushka worked along with a team of two painters to prepare and paint over 200 different colours on over a 170 pipes. The piece was installed in place by a team of metal fabricators.
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We are attached to our made habitat, and buildings are the tangible traces of that habitat. I believe these built structures are a kind of evidence of our own treatment of ourselves. Manush John
Structural Manipulation
Structures have always fascinated me because they help me relate to lived experience. Every line, every colour, every form and every shadow that makes up a structure has a purpose and gives the structure its identity. Devika Shah
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MANUSH JOHN Artist. www.manushjohn.com manushjohn@gmail.com Manush John’s work has ranged across digital painting and illustration, digital sculpting, bronze casting, sound design, film, animation, museology and curation. He weaves several of these aspects into his projects, be it in their final form, their presentation or their documentation, and has participated in art shows both nationally and internationally. Having developed a rigorous and in-depth understanding of human anatomy, his work often explores how ideas can be expressed through the human body. Regardless of form, his themes attend to various social realities and norms as he underlines, reflects upon and critiques them through his work.
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CONTROL OF THE VOID Manush John A sculpture depicting man rising and morphing into the surrounding architecture. Timeline July 2014 - Dec 2015 Site Platform 2, near elevator Media CNC cut MDF
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With his preoccupation with anatomy, Manush’s endeavours at Art in Transit have centred largely around his negotiations with the form of the body and what can be communicated through this form. Given the ability of body language to hold and convey various levels of information, Manush sought to understand what the placement of a human figure within a public site could generate. From the very beginning, all his engagements with the station, whether in the form of sketching or mapping or metaphor making, have tried to tackle the vastness of the space in different ways. In his early explorations, he found different points of disconnect in the way one experienced the station. He attempted to address this with a sculptural installation of a human figure looking upwards, towards the floor above, the posture automatically enticing the audience to follow the gaze of the sculpture to look upward at the next floor. Prototyping this sculpture gave rise to several difficulties, both technical and conceptual, compelling him to rethink both his form and his ideas.
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A different conceptual strand Manush had explored was the sense of intimidation perpetuated both by the vastness of the physical space as well as the atmosphere of control and authority that is tied to an environment such as the metro station, with cameras, guards and unspoken rules to follow. Moving closer to his primary skillset of digital sculpting and taking inspiration from the work of Antony Gormley, Manush started exploring block-like humanoid forms that could serve as extensions from the building itself. With several iterations along these lines, some of which attempted to negotiate with the role of the i53.
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security guard at the station, he finally settled on the form of four sculptures, emerging from ground, the first being most rendered and detailed, while the last being most abstracted.
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He chose to situate this sculpture on the platform right in front of the elevator, as if for the sculpture to parallel the act of rising up and emerging from the ground below. His sculpture was designed digitally on a 3D rendering software and then translated into layers that could be CNC cut out of MDF. Along with a team of fabricators, Manush had these various pieces of MDF, all numbered and indexed, transported to the station and stacked one on top of the other to build the physical sculpture. The sculptures are fixed to the ground via a metal pole that runs through the centre of all the layers and is drilled into the ground. The pieces were finally painted off-white, mimicking the walls of the building while at the same time contrasting the granite of the floors.
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REUBEN SAMSON Writer. Visual Artist. reuben.samson93@gmail.com With skills ranging from writing to graphic design to illustration, and accompanied by a keen sensibility for installation and exhibition design, Reuben Samson’s work travels across several different forms of visual and literary media. Interested in polymathic concepts, underground visual narratives and literature, his work is frequently embedded with literary allusions, pop-cultural references and social commentary, filtered through a personal, introspective lens. His work, often concerned with the irony associated with the beauty and repulsiveness of human behavior, brings depth and dimension to the contexts he chooses to represent, revealing their inherent contradictions.
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When a city is changing so fast, what does it mean to speculate about this change? What gets recorded and what gets lost in these transitions?
Cityscapes & Urbanization
Shambhavi Singh
Capturing fragile, wounded, decaying, disintegrating subjects before they were completely obliterated was sort of a way to use the tactic of suspended animation to preserve the last vestigial remnants of animistic integrity, the same way a blurred photograph captures a fleeting moment. Reuben Samson
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THE STASIS SYNDICATE Reuben Samson A mixed-media installation that preserves anomalous spaces in Peenya through photography, illustration and writing. Timeline January - July 2015 Site Platform 2 Media Analog illustration and photographic print on acrylic 131
Reuben’s project at Peenya began as an attempt to represent the subtleties of its industrial landscape through non-linear subconscious narratives. Engaging with the tensions between the rigidity and frailty of industrial spaces, he hoped to create a contained atmosphere within the metro station that could capture the ambivalence of these spaces through layered imagery and visual metaphors. Keeping away from typical assumptions one would make of an industrial landscape such as Peenya, he intended to use such imagery to create an emotional palette through which his audience could connect to the space in a more visceral and, therefore, more authentic manner.
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“A wide, gaping gash gnawed right into an earthy precipice, cutting into its every sedimentary layer, revealing embedded signs of industrial stigmata.”
Reuben’s process began with populating this emotional palette with literary and philosophical references, photographs, synoptic visual narratives, lyrical musings, sketches that captured the stark and brittle landscape of Peenya’s scrapyard and metaphoric illustrations that represented the area’s more intangible qualities. His process soon began streamlining itself down to two major strands: Composing reflective written pieces about the sites he isolated, and then creating illustrations using the text as scaffolding.
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He narrowed in on his unifying theme: to capture and suspend aesthetic anomalies in Peenya that were ironic, self-contradicting and in a fragile state of flux. From a railway track cutting across a playground, to a lone goalpost, to a crumbling old watch factory, these anomalous spaces had all in some way failed to meet the expectations placed upon them and were consequently left to waste away.
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He wanted an equally transient and impermanent canvas, and chose to print his images on clear acrylic that would emulate the windows of the metro coach along the platform. The form allowed for three potential layers in the final image viewed – the image imposed on the surface of the window, the reflection it produced and the view that was visible through it. The final stretch of the project involved an intense monthlong period of generating content for the nine windows: composing lyrical reflections based on the anomalous spaces he discovered, producing detailed illustrations based on the text generated, digitizing the same and then superimposing them upon treated, motion-blurred photographs of the spaces. The illustrations printed as a layer over the photograph could appear and disappear depending on one’s position with respect to the piece, based on how they merged with the photograph in the background, producing a subtle animated effect as one walked across the length of the installation. The windows were installed on an aluminum framework that was assembled atop the granite parapet, running from pillar to pillar across a prominent 60-foot-long stretch of the platform.
“With helmsmen long since departed and cargoes long since raided over scores of machinationsand victories, an isolated fleet of vessels lies sinking in its own harbor.” i59.
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SIDDHANTH SHETTY Artist. zorpstsid@gmail.com Siddhanth Shetty is a multi-media artist whose primary inquiry deals with understanding the many ways in which one may amplify, alter or supplement the experience of any given context. Having begun by primarily making short films, he found the process limiting and eventually abandoned allegiance to any one form, instead allowing context to dictate the most effective media. His practice hinges on a thorough immersion into context. As such, his process involves inhabiting spaces, listening, conversing and documenting within them and allowing ideas to generate from the space, even if they’re eventually not made for the space itself. His work is often participative in nature as he explores forms and media that can actively address and negate the homogenizing nature of our urbanity.
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I find it very difficult to associate with the values often attached to public art – values of social and political activism, of having a certain agenda, of affecting change of some sort. Limiting and stereotypical as these values may be, they seem to keep me from relating to the field. Ruchika Nambiar
Cityscapes & Urbanization
Interaction & Play
A public space like a metro station has the potential to reduce the distance of dissociation between a layman’s notion of art and his acknowledging of it as a creative way of being. Public art can be used to subvert the ways in which we homogenize the public. Siddhanth Shetty
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WHILE YOU’RE WAITNG Siddhanth Shetty A series of participative social experiments. Timeline July 2014 - Dec 2015 Site Platform and concourse Media Various 137
Siddhanth’s project at Peenya has, from the beginning, revolved around the central idea of creating a community space in the metro. Across the year, he has explored several different ways of achieving this through temporary/ephemeral participative installations set up in the station. Questioning how one could set up such a space in a space of transit, while at the same time not wanting to force any forms of interaction upon his audience, his initial ideas engaged with creating a community library or reading space in or near the station. Soon however, he expanded his efforts to include several different forms of interaction and participation.
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For a period of twenty days, Siddhanth set up three experiments in the station that he documented rigorously each day. The first was a blackboard positioned on the platform on which he wrote a new question everyday, allowing people to answer by writing on the board. He started engaging the staff in the station as well, as they often became the first to try out his experiments and soon began helping him translate his material into Kannada. The second experiment was the “Take a book, leave a book” shelf that he filled with books and left on the platform, encouraging people to take a book away if they left one in return, allowing people a continued and sustained engagement with the intervention across time. The third p134.
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intervention was words written on magnets, stuck on the pillars on the platform, allowing people to rearrange them as they pleased. Starting with English, he also included Hindi and Kannada words. This intervention not only had people engaging with the work itself, but also with each other across time as they added to or modified the arrangements made by someone before them. His final experiment at the station was a “Grow your own hair or cut your own hair space” where he questioned the role of personal agency in public spaces and tried providing a space that could facilitate a kind of agency we are not accustomed to having in a public space like a metro station. He set up a DIY hair cutting station on the concourse, allowing people to come, sit down and cut their own hair, with assistance offered. “The ‘grow your own hair’ acted more as a visual affirmation for those who might have an innate desire to grow their own hair and the ‘cut your own hair’ as an active space to experiment with one’s hair.” Actively documenting his experiments everyday, Siddhanth has had the opportunity to engage with various types of people, understanding the different motivations with which his experiments have been approached by their audience.
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What is it about the thought of a stranger that stops people from interacting with one another? Ria Bajaj
Interaction & Play
There is a specific way our bodies react to people around us. They react differently to strangers and to people close to us. Humans tend to judge one another as soon as they see them and these social behaviours are a product of that knowledge. Jaivardhan Channey
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RIA BAJAJ Product Designer. www.behance.net/ria_bajaj ria.bajaj@hotmail.com Ria Bajaj’s interests lie primarily in product and furniture design and she situates her practice along the line between art and design, finding interesting sculptural and aesthetic ways to express functional forms. Every project she embarks on evidences a keen interest and a high understanding of motion and interactivity and she refines this sensibility of hers with every new endeavor. Her practice invariably engages with how people interact with the spaces they inhabit, her interventions providing different or improved opportunities for interaction, and while her work most often manifests in the form of product or furniture design, she is able to translate these interests into other forms as well, such as murals and other visual media.
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SYNERGY Ria Bajaj A mural that visually summarizes an urban traveler’s experience. Timeline July 2014 - July 2015 Site Platform 2 Media Wooden furniture
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Across her two semesters at Art in Transit, Ria’s interests have always invariably come back to the core idea of facilitating interaction through furniture, though she has explored this central idea through several different conceptual lenses. Her process has always begun with observing a given context, isolating a problem and then proceeding to develop a solution for it. Her initial explorations at Peenya in her first semester revolved around using interactive furniture as a tool to comment on gender issues in public spaces. However she quickly discovered her core interest lay in the conceptualizing and making of interactive furniture and began studying the platform to assess what opportunities existed for such furniture. The platform is the only site of waiting in the metro station, and she characterized it as one with great potential energy for interaction. However, she also noted the very palpable tension that fills a public space of waiting, with people forming little bubbles around themselves that have an almost physical presence in the space. Ria then began to develop furniture ideas that could encourage people to at least make eye contact and acknowledge one another in public space. Early on in her process, her ideas also developed the awareness and sensitivity to provide opportunity for interaction rather than force or mandate it. Her ideas included a group rocking chair that required multiple people to make it work, a slider seat that allowed one to move one’s seat closer to or farther away from the next, puzzle seats that required a partner to complete the seat’s backrest, among several other potential ideas.
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She began creating a proposal for a series of wheeled-and-channeled seating installations that would play out across the length of platform, with each individual seating set providing opportunity for a different type of interaction – for groups, for individuals, for pairs and couples, for children, etc. For the purpose of her project, she decided to realize one of these ideas, namely a large puzzle seating piece situated at the extreme end of the platform. Through several rounds of trial and error, the piece was fabricated with a wooden false flooring with tracks cut into it for the box seats to be able to run on wheels. The false flooring was then finally covered in vinyl.
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JAIVARDHAN CHANNEY New Media Interaction Designer. jaichanney.com jai_channey@yahoo.com A rare case of a designer-turnedengineer, Jaivardhan Channey is a new media artist whose work ranges from smart textiles to interactive films and sound installations to product design to interactive typography. His work concerns itself with altering or enhancing the existing ways in which we perceive and experience the world, while delivering playful commentary on human behaviour and interaction. As such, his process includes observation of people and spaces, and his projects often involve modifying the functions of everyday objects, adding a new dimension to them, often with an element of play or surprise. Making use of technology, Jaivardhan’s approach to work is hands-on, as he continuously seeks out new techniques and methods to enhance the opportunities for interaction that his work can create.
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How do people react when they know they are being watched? How does their behaviour change? Jaivardhan Channey
Local Community
Interaction & Play
How much can community engagement impact the way people perceive their surroundings? How might they think of themselves differently in relation to the spaces and people around them? Siddhanth Shetty
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WHEN OBJECTS BREATHE Jaivardhan Channey A CCTV installation that mimics human social behavior and gestures. Timeline July 2015 - Dec 2015 Site Platform 1 Media CCTV cameras
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Jaivardhan’s practice has revolved around technology and interaction, using the former to facilitate, challenge and complicate the idea of the latter. He entered Peenya looking for opportunities the station could provide for interaction and was drawn to the platform given that it was the only site of waiting and therefore the only site one could observe any existing human interaction.
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Through his observations on the platform, he began converging on the very basic realities of social interaction in public spaces. Such interactions between strangers in public spaces are always characterized by hesitation and awkwardness and a projected sense of voyeurism. One is always conscious of the possibility of being watched or observed and is therefore hyper-aware of engaging in such behaviours oneself. Jaivardhan decided to use this as the basis for his project and intervene in the form of a playful commentary on this social awkwardness. He chose to use the form of CCTV cameras given that it was an element already present onsite and could thus integrate well with the station. He decided to program dummy cameras such that they would mimic these recognizable social behaviours. For example, the same way in which one would quickly avert their gaze if caught staring at a stranger, the cameras too would behave such that one would quickly turn away if the other were to look directly at it. Through several experiments and tests, Jaivardhan worked out the programming of the cameras, ironing out technical glitches along the way. He decided to position his installation on the dormant platform in the station, directly opposite the active one, so that people could witness the cameras in action while they waited for their train. The cameras were finally mounted upon a metal fabricated stand that structurally resembled the existing station signboard stands.
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Early on, I tried striking conversations with the residents of Peenya. But the biggest challenge was to get them to trust me enough to talk to me. They mostly assumed I worked for the BMRCL or the media. Harleen Chatha
Local Community
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The little boy approached me as I made notes in my book and introduced himself to me. I realized that if I needed to keep coming back and talking to him, I needed some sort of anchor. So I asked him if I could photograph him and he smiled and posed for me. He spoke to me about school and his parents, his hobbies and his friends. I left feeling like I knew Peenya a little better. Deepti Ramakrishnan
DEEPTI RAMAKRISHNAN Visual Artist. behance.net/deeptiramakrishnan deepti19@hotmail.com Deepti Ramakrishnan’s work is largely focused on her practice of imagemaking and illustration. While on the one hand she explores a certain realism through portraiture, on the other she explores abstraction and surrealism through themes of fantasy, mythology and symbolism. She has tried her hand at various different media, from pencil sketches to water colours to inked drawings to digital illustration. With an effortless ability to interact and converse with people, these interactions often find their way into her work even while being intercut with personal musings and whimsical explorations.
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SONDER Deepti Ramakrishnan A book that documents the author’s interactions with two families in Peenya. Timeline July 2014 - July 2015 Site Ephemeral/non-site Media Illustrated book
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Deepti’s engagement with Peenya began with her interactions with a small community pocket very close to the station. Initially finding Peenya dull and dreary, she quickly gravitated towards the colourful community, listening to their stories and partaking in their day. While initially using these stories as fodder for creating a piece about Peenya’s history, she realized this trajectory wasn’t stimulating enough to her, and she began narrowing in on what truly interested her about this community: the conversations. It was just as much about her role in the interaction as it was theirs. She began a process of notemaking and illustration, photographing the people she spoke to, and coming back to them later with sketched portraits, using this as an anchor to further conversations with them. She grew deeply invested in two families in Peenya, visiting them everyday, letting them try saris and jewelry on her, playing with the children and attending birthday parties. She wished to experience these interactions fully and as such, did not try to record them or take notes while there, but instead reflect on them later and record them through memory. As a result, several personal references, memories and musings began making their way into her material. In order to recreate this experience instead of creating a journalistic documentation of it, Deepti chose the form of an creative non-fiction book that would splice together these various conversations, memories, musings and drawings and string them together such that they could evoke for her reader the experiences she had with this community.
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Her book intended to be a celebration of shared human experience that crossed lines of class, status, religion and the like. The book was created by assessing all the material she had and then splicing them to form new connections and interactions between the material. After editing the material down, she then proceeded to storyboard it and understand how to visually represent or supplement the textual material. She chose the aesthetic of stippling and proceeded to create all her visual material for the book, finally compiling it all together to create a single cohesive book.
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Aroushka Jinelle D’mello At the end of the day, do we have a sign next to our piece giving it a title? Ruchika Nambiar We haven’t really discussed it at length but titles are surely a possibility.
Aroushka Jinelle D’mello I just picture being asked. “Do you think people will make the association?”
THE OPENING
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Working towards Peenya’s launch exhibition was an act of exercising objectivity as we devised strategies to tie the space together and formulate a language that could not only visually brand the station but also aid comprehension of the artworks to some degree. The launch of Peenya coincided with Srishti’s annual interim semester, and as such, we had over a 100 students across five classes working at Peenya over the course of November and December. This section documents the month that led up to Peenya’s opening.
THE AIT INTERIM COURSE Srishti’s interim semester is a time of high intensity and activity, when facilitators and artists at Srishti collaborate with visiting artists from around the world to create a wide set of courses for students that explore various different themes and forms. The interim courses all culminate in a final interim exhibition in December. Art in Transit ran one such interim course at Peenya station, with the goal to bring in new students with fresh eyes and have them work with us to develop a curatorial language for the station. Over this interim course, AIT invited artist Aastha Chauhan, who had wide experience with event curation and public art and outreach, to help us run the class through this month. A group of students worked on developing a graphic pattern that could brand the station and travel along the pillars. They developed the patterns by collaging different elements from their environment and surroundings and their colour palettes were informed by the artworks nearby. After developing these patterns, the students proceeded to paint them onto the different pillars at the station.
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Some student groups were given specific design problems to address, such as devising strategies to lead commuters towards certain artworks, replacing an existing flex barricade with a new, cost-effective and impermeable one and conceptualizing ideas to address the vast emptiness of the expansive concourse. A small group of students worked with text, writing copy for all ephemera and collateral, but also understanding how text could be introduced into the station and help make certain artworks and processes more legible. The outcome of this exercise was a selection of quotes (from students, commuters, security
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guards, etc) and questions that could give a voice to the station while also giving certain artworks an entry point and cluing people into the processes behind them. This text was executed by a professional sign painter in the station. Finally, a small group of students worked on the branding for the project, designing a logo for Art in Transit, designing a complete map of all the floors of the station and designing posters and collateral for the launch exhibition.
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AASTHA CHAUHAN
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Faculty | AIT Interim Aastha joined the AIT team in December, helping us develop an objective view of the station and guiding the students as they devised and executed curatorial strategies for it. Having specialized in sculpture, Aastha headed the community based art initiatives at the KHOJ International Artists Association in New Delhi. As leader of this initiative, she facilitated several independent art projects aimed at involving the Khirkee community that surrounds the KHOJ studios. Projects have ranged from artist commissioned site-specific installations, to local shop makeovers, clay toy-making workshops with neighborhood children, and facilitating other artists’ projects in the neighborhood. She is also interested in micro broadcasting and works closely with 90.4MHz Henvalvani community radio station in Chamba, Uttarakhand.
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SRISHTI INTERIM 2015 AT PEENYA Given that Peenya was an active and rich site for enquiry, it was offered to Srishti for other interim courses to be conducted at the station over November and December. As such, four interim courses from Srishti were conducted at the Peenya metro station, each coming into the fray with their own lenses and frameworks within which their students would conceptualize and develop project ideas. These courses produced both permanent and temporary work that was exhibited at the final exhibition in Peenya. This section provides a brief overview of the four visiting interim courses conducted at the station.
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Displacement Diaries Course Faculty Amy Golding & Manasee Jog This course engaged its students in developing collaborative performative pieces that were conducted through the exhibition day at Peenya station as well as on the train. The performances sought to capture the spirit of the community around Peenya and bring it back into the station while simultaneously taking the station’s creative practice outside to the community. Themes of place, urban regeneration, displacement, stagnation and melancholy were addressed as the students used storytelling to offer a better peek into Peenya’s society.
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Unscrapping Course Faculty Siddhartha Kararwal & Manoj Dangoria Embracing Peenya’s defining industrial identity, the Unscrapping team harvested scrap and industrial waste from around the area and developed their responses to site in the form of large scrap sculptures within the metro station. The students worked in groups to execute their ideas, ranging from interactive pieces such as mechanical birds and pinball gravitrams to scrap furniture and visual 3D pieces.
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Students in this course made use of the act of walking and the frames provided by photography to ‘point’ at Peenya. The group explored questions of privacy and publicity, sense of sight and site, silence, time, space, materiality and consequently immateriality in order to freshly portray and activate the Peenya locality. The course culminated in several individual ephemeral outputs such as walks, photographs, sound recordings and ambient installations and other performative and participative pieces.
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Miraki Course Faculty Ruchira Das & Sadhvi Jawa The students under this course explored the idea of textures and tried to understand the various experiences and information that is encoded in texture, trying to understand how texture could translate into a language that could keep us connected and involved. Their final display involved temporary textural installations executed in groups that could be interacted with, but also added to and modified by its audience.
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LAUNCHING PEENYA Peenya culminated in an opening exhibition on the 16th of December 2015. The event showcased the 19 long term projects and additionally, the work of the various visiting courses that displayed smaller interventions at the station, both temporary and permanent. With Peenya complete, Art in Transit intends to continue its relationship with the BMRCL by moving from station to station, not only trying to transform the way people relate to their public spaces, but also constantly questioning and complicating the way artists and designers respond to public spaces.
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This kind of artwork creates more awareness in the public, and it definitely helps arrest the crime in Bangalore city. It’s a welcome change. Gayatri, Metro commuter
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The cut outs of the children seem very natural when you enter the station, so that’s very nice. Also, the best-of-waste projects are very interesting. Shalini, metro commuter
It’s very interesting to put artwork in a public space, because you’re engaging a set of people who wouldn’t normally go to a gallery. Exhibition visitor
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“Methodology that teaches students to confront societal values and beliefs requires critical thinking strategies that compel them to define complex issues, analyse data, identify assumptions, infer solutions, apply the acquired information through art making, and finally to conceptualize new forms of evaluation.� New Genre Public Art Education, Gaye Green
THE AIT TEAM
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Art in Transit has, over the last year, been run by a core group of facilitators from Srishti, who’ve guided the students through their various processes. Hailing from different disciplines within the field of art and design, AIT facilitators have been able to provide its students with expertise in several different areas - from public art to visual communication to curation to space and product design.
How was the AIT project conceived? We’d started working with the BBMP, executing public murals and Mr. Vasanth Rao (GM Finance, BMRCL) was interested in the way we were working with communities and students and approached us. The value of this project is really about the specific point in time Bangalore is in. During such rapid transitions, how could we create placebased identities in a city that is very quickly losing its local identities as homogeneity begins to settle in?
Art in Transit Peenya has been a unique marriage between several different stakeholders. How has this defined AIT?
ARZU MISTRY Team Lead + Faculty Arzu is an educator, ecologist, visual artist, and dancer. She maintains a high level of dedication and enthusiasm for the arts and ecology as mediums for pedagogy, advocacy, transformation, and intervention. Her practice centers on connecting educators, youth and families with place through interdisciplinary education using memory, story, play and art making through community art/ ecology projects, livelihoods training, teacher professional development and educational research and practice.
I think the fact that there have been many players -- the government, an educational institution, a corporate sponsor, individual student practices -- has made the project extremely dynamic. We were proving we could engage with an educational project on one end, engage deeply with a public art practice that was authentic, and give the city something valuable and yet high quality. The constraints that consequently came up were both educational and informative. The way we sought funding from donors in and around Peenya didn’t ultimately work out, but did frame the binaries we eventually worked with -- place vs. practice, ephemeral vs. archival, local vs. global, impact vs. value -- which would not have surfaced if not for the constraints created by all these moving parts.
What were the biggest challenges faced by this pilot over the year?
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I think the first was, how do you work with emergent processes and yet have a curatorial hat? And it’s something I don’t think we’ve cracked yet. We could have also been smarter about the scale we were working at. But because we were allowing for such an emergent process, we did not set in place a framework to engage dynamically with scale. Thirdly, because this was our first project, we were worried about delivering and were very literal in our engagement instead of being more experimental or ephemeral. This was the angst of a first time interaction in public space on a budget, and the responsibility of graduating and educating students. I hope the next time we’re able to engage with scale, time and money differently and think about these constraints in a more fluid way.
What needs to be addressed in the contemporary public art scene? We are at a moment where a lot of what is emerging as public art practice is designed for high impact. Big images across big walls in big cities. What this did is bind images only through one rubric - impact. The danger of it mimicking a slam bang approach promoted by hoardings and print media is worrying in terms of producing a narrow myopic ambition for public graphic art practice in the time to come. It has certainly brought attention to the idea of art in public spaces, but after announcing its arrival, it now needs to evolve into other forms of engagement.
Q & A
How have students nuanced their own practices through a project like this? Public spaces are contested territories where there is some form of imposition of the artists’ ideas upon a space. It’s the ability to keep this dialogue between the artist and the context alive that makes one’s practice valuable. We attempt to be constantly critical of our various positions within the public art realm, always asking ourselves whether we are fetishising the local, how such a fetishisation may limit the range of our artistic responses to site and how we may overcome any such limiting frameworks.
What has been the benefit in spending an entire year engaging with a single site? How have practices matured as a function of time? The response to site is not just architectural or physical - it is a continuing dialogue where strategies emerge as a response to the realities of site. It is this practice that is the cornerstone of having a sustained engagement with the idea of public art, and not just making art in public places, not just imposing one’s art upon a site. We have tried to activate processes in a way that it becomes just as crucial as the final artwork itself. Countering the idea of the passive spectacle, an art intervention isn’t just the final output, but is any point in the process that serves as a point of activation where spectacle and spectator are both active, where even the act of painting or working in public space is an intervention in itself, and this act and its consequences influence and affect the final output.
AMITABH KUMAR Team Lead + Faculty Trained as a painter, Amitabh has explored numerous forms of graphic art, from graphic design and typography, to comics and graphic novels, to illustration and mural-making. Having worked across the spectrum from content creation to curation, he has participated in several exhibitions and art fairs. It is this engagement with contemporary art that made him aware of the lacuna between art and culture, and he began to address this gap by working in public spaces, primarily in the form of murals and print media.
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What according to you was the greatest potential a space like a metro station offered for artistic intervention? A Metro Station offers a unique opportunity for art and design to create a human scale within a monumental space that has been designed by engineers. As with any public space, the intervention of art or design has to be calibrated to engage the widest possible audience and yet be insightful and expressive in a manner that does justice to the complexities of the creator’s own process.
Tell us a little bit about the research tools used in the first semester and how they helped nuance the students’ projects. The vastness and complexity of the space and potential audience meant that we as a group had to build our capacity to meaningfully engage with people and space before we began to respond creatively. The initial weeks were a complete immersion in the space in and around the station, understanding the character of Peenya through historical, cultural, social and architectural mapping. We looked at how the arrival of the Metro is affecting the spaces and communities and various aspects of life within.
What’s been the most valuable takeaway from a project like Art in Transit for you?
SAMIR PARKER Project Faculty [SEM 1+2] Samir’s practice as a designer and artist is shaped by his engagement with space and the identities it enables him to inhabit. Across media and scale, overlaying existing and imagined urban materials, he creates imagery that responds to and provokes the diverse aspirations that energise the city. Samir seeks out opportunities and alliances that can challenge the existing status quo of the politics of public space. His work explores the idea that the narrative of the city shall not be defined by the most privileged, but subverted by the most inventive.
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We began through small scale interventions that would engage people and make our ideas more accessible. As an educator and facilitator, my journey of discovery was enriched by the constant negotiations with my colleagues and students. The final installations were a testament to the student’s efforts and determination, the support of the Srishti family and some very capable engineering by the Metro staff and contractors. The success of this project is not simply in the completion of the installations but the possibilities that they open up across Bengaluru and other cities.
What does a project like AIT offer to students that is different from other art and design courses? AIT happens in real time with real people. The process is itself the test whether it is interacting with passersby, negotiating with vendors or management or finding funds for a bold idea or dealing with the realities of health and safety. Students emerge from this project already in touch with the world. The kind of student who really succeeded in AIT was the kind who was itching to get out and already ready to practice. To some extent, it takes arrogance and a willingness to fall on one’s face, to put out art for public consumption; also a strong stomach for criticism.
You’ve been most involved with AIT during its nascent first semester of proposal development. What was most challenging about pushing it into a space of action? Perhaps the most difficult part was to communicate our vision for the city. Art is considered frivolous by many, especially in an urban environment of insufficient infrastructure. Most people think art can only come after the basics of shelter, food and housing are sorted out for all people, in keeping with Maslow’s Need’s hierarchy. It was hard to explain that Public art interventions can, raise street safety, turn strangers into communities and create a sense of ownership, apart from providing important messaging for citizens. And Public art is a great leveller since its for everyone.
AGNISHIKHA CHOUDHURI Project Faculty [SEM 1+2] A design practitioner, educator and researcher, Agnishikha’s research interests and explorations are varied and currently include design pedagogy and history, redefining urban landscapes and public space design. Her work concerns itself with exploring how humans interact and occupy space and the spatial politics of individual and communal occupation, and contextualising urbanization in terms of waste managements, wellness and healthcare.
What kind of change do you see a project like Art in Transit making in the way government bodies in India view their public spaces? The hope is that this project will be the experiment that proves the public art makes a difference to urban spaces. Government bodies will have a pilot to justify allocating funds to interventions that are not just infrastructural.
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What is the potential a space like a metro station could offer in terms of performance art and public dialogue? The metro station is a dynamic platform for interactive performance as civic dialogue. As a public space, a Metro Station has a clear utility. Performance stretches beyond the utility of the space by creating moments of wonder as transient as the people moving through the station.
EVAN HASTINGS Project Faculty [SEM 3] Evan integrates Theatre of the Oppressed, Drama Therapy and elements of Hip Hop culture into his approach to artistic social healing. Grass Rooted in community organizing, he acts in, directs and produces original performance pieces that grapple with pressing issues while innovative aesthetics invite audience engagement. Evan facilitates in correctional facilities, community theatres, schools and colleges. He also works with therapists, social workers, artists and educators by consulting and providing professional development.
What artistic opportunities could a different metro station -- such as one located in a more commercial area, or one that’s architecturally different like an underground station -- offer that’s different from Peenya? A station in the heart of the city would see much more passenger traffic than Peenya, creating more opportunities for participatory works. Specifically in underground stations, there is a higher degree of acoustic autonomy and control of lighting, which make these spaces conducive to immersive theatre and multimedia interactive installations.
Having worked on several participative and performative interventions in public space, what are the challenges and opportunities provided by this specific kind of audience: metro commuters?
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The challenge of creating participatory performance in a metro station is one of capturing and sustaining attention. Since commuters enter the stations to travel somewhere, most people are only in the station until the next train comes. The challenge for artists is to create meaningful engagement with the time constraints of the train schedule. If the work is engaging enough, some commuters will blow off their train to stay, but that isn’t the goal the work.
RESEARCH ASSISTANTS Art in Transit’s collaborative environment has had students and faculty working together on several aspects of the project above and beyond the individual projects themselves. From communication, documentation, curation, content generation and management, logistics and planning, AIT has always engaged its students in mobilizing its collective goals. As such, a handful of AIT students have transitioned into working as Research Assistants with AIT, working for periods between six months to a year and counting.
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Ruchika Nambiar Research Assistant Ruchika has looked after communication and logistics primarily, assisting with in-class facilitation and student engagement, guiding students through conceptual development, facilitation of onsite work, budgeting and management of project finances. She has also been involved with generating and maintaining content for Art in Transit, creating and editing content for its website, brochures, books and other such media forms.
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Reuben Samson Research Assistant Reuben’s work at Art in Transit has primarily involved creating and designing media for the project, including graphic design and writing work for project ephemera and event collateral. He has been involved in devising curatorial strategies for the Peenya station, problem solving for physical installations, working with students and guiding them through conceptual development as well as production and fabrication processes.
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Aditya Bharadwaj Siddhanth Shetty Research Assistant Siddhanth’s work at Art in Transit has involved photographic and video documentation of the project, creating video content and conducting interviews of students, faculty and other stakeholders and creating video documentation of the various individual projects as well as the project as a whole for offsite presentation purposes. Siddhanth has also been involved in devising curatorial strategies for Peenya station as well as working with students and guiding them through conceptual development.
Research Assistant Aditya joined Art in Transit just as the Peenya project wrapped up and has been involved with tying up remaining work at Peenya, working towards final documentation of the project for offsite events and presentation purposes, creating written media and working on the design of collateral for events. Aditya also assists with class facilitation for the new semester of the project, guiding students through conceptual development and taking care of logistics, production and management.
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TALKS+WORKSHOPS +EVENTS
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Art in Transit is always looking to nuance its relationship with public art. It is always attempting to complicate notions of public space, transience, identity and community. To this end, it is always looking for opportunities to expand out into different spaces and collaborate with different types of organizations and individuals in the form of seminars and charrettes and reach out to increasingly diverse audiences.
AIT IN KANDIVALI 1-7 March 2015 In March 2015, The Urban Vision, a think-do tank of architects, invited the Art in Transit project and its current batch of final year students to participate in a week-long charrette creating sitespecific public artwork in Samtanagar, Kandivali, Mumbai. Samtanagar is being redeveloped and most of what we saw around was either on its way out or would be in the course of the next couple of months. The road extending from the highway to the entrance of Thakur Village was undergoing a major transformation. Caught between this flux were complex webs of life that silently watched as their very foundation threatened to be relocated. Our role as artists was to respond to this dynamic of shifting lives and changing structures. With ten distinct creative practices, we sought to pronounce the undercurrents of what constitutes a place caught between its past and an impending ‘redeveloped’ future.
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DEBUNKING BINARIES 18 April 2015 AIT Facilitators Arzu Mistry and Amitabh Kumar gave a talk on public art practice, through the lens of the Art in Transit project at the ‘Art. Life. Technology’ Symposium organized by FOA-FLUX on the 18th of April, 2015. Their presentation aimed to highlight and confront the various binaries creates within the world of public art, activism vs. gentrification, place vs. practice, impact vs. value, ephemeral vs. archival.
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THE ANATOMY OF PEDAGOGY
11-13 August 2015 Creative Time is a New York based organization committed to presenting important discourses around art for our times and engaging global audiences in a dialogue that transcends geographic, racial and socioeconomic boundaries. Organizing a summit as part of the Venice Biennale around the topics of pedagogy and the facilitation of art-based practices in educational institutions, they invited global audiences to be a part of this dialogue through satellite screening sites at different venues. Art in Transit hosted one such screening site at Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology that brought home these dialogues around the intersection of art pedagogy and practice. We invited faculty from the Srishti community to engage in discussion and attempted to illuminate Srishti’s relationship with systems of knowledge sharing and culture production. The event was structured around five broad themes: Curriculum, Institution, Context, Practice and Participation. These themes were made relevant to our institutional context by way of discussion and supplemented with live streamed dialogues from the Creative Time Summit in Venice. 195
ARTIST TALKS + WORKSHOPS A defining aspect of Art in Transit has been its anchoring within a learningbased framework. We’ve encouraged several different kinds of learning, organizing artist talks, workshops and seminars to create a space where students can develop and appreciate multiple perspectives within the field of public art practice.
Manush John | Observing Space Workshop: 19 January 2015 This workshop involved observation of how commuters moved through and interacted with the metro station. It involved a series of exercises that helped understand commuter movement through the space, study commuter behaviour through posture, focusing on void spaces, surveillance and security and how these impacted behaviour.
DesignEarth | Natural Building Workshop: 20 January 2015 Jackson Poretta and Arnab Basu gave the AIT class a talk on their work in natural building, bamboo craft and construction, ecological design and permaculture.
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Ruchika Nambiar | Diorama Making Workshop: 19 January 2015 The aim of this workshop was to begin building a list of DIY tools and techniques for diorama making and rendering and understand how narrative could be conveyed through a static 3D scene.
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Uwe Jonas | Public Artist Artist Talk: 27 January 2015 Uwe Jonas, a German public artist currently doing a residency at the Goethe Institute in Bangalore, gave the class a talk on his practice as a public artist and some of the work he’s done during his time in India.
Tyler Norman | The Beehive Collective Artist Talk: 16 January 2015 At the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore, Tyler’s talk delved into the process of creating one of the Beehive Collective’s complex illustrated narratives, ‘The True Cost of Coal’.
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Ruchika Nambiar | Narrative Artist Artist Talk: 23 January 2015
Evan Hastings | Theatre Artist Artist Talk: 27 January 2015
AIT graduate Ruchika Nambiar gave the class a talk on her emerging practice as a narrative artist and the process of establishing self-referentiality in one’s work.
Theatre artist Evan Hastings gave the AIT class a talk about his practice and its dilemmas, touching upon a couple of his performance pieces and the social issues they each attempt to address.
Alok Utsav | Brewing the In-Between Workshop: 6 February 2015
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This workshop involved perceiving the different stimuli that the Peenya metro station and its inhabitants experienced and further translating that understanding into quick spatial interventions onsite.
Gautham & Vanya | The Art of Making Artist Talk: 28 January 2015
Pragya Joshi & Raj Palan | Collaborative Murals Workshop: 31 January 2015
Gautham and Vanya gave the class a talk about their practice and philosophy of making and the workshops and classes they run encouraging children to analyse and understand the way things around them work and helping them conceptualise and build interactive mechanical objects of their own.
In this workshop, the students conceptualised characters that could act as a metaphor for the SFS colony in Yelahanka and then worked towards composing their individual characters into a single mural in the colony.
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Samir Parker | Roof/Tarp/City Artist Talk: 15 May 2015 Samir shared with the AIT and Srishti community his Mumbai-based art project, ‘Roof/Tarp/City’, that looked at engaging locals from the communities in converting their tarp-roofed settlements into colourful quilts in different pockets of the city as it prepared for the rains.
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PARTNER PROFILES
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Art in Transit thrives on collaboration. To achieve the kind of impact it intends in the public sphere, it is crucial for the project to develop strong and lasting relationships with different kinds of organizations in different domains the educational, the civic, the corporate. Over 2014-2015, we’ve been fortunate to receive the support of three major organizations that have helped realize the Peenya Pilot.
SRISHTI INSTITUTE OF ART, DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY Organizing Institution Srishti has been engaged in several public space projects through collaborations with the BBMP, BMTC, BMRCL, Resident Welfare Associations and many citybased organizations. Being an academic space, the Art in Transit project has had the responsibility of nurturing and developing individual student practices. Besides the Art in Transit faculty that mentor the students on a day-to-day basis, Srishti’s institutional framework provides for several other forms of support that students receive during their project semester, from personal tutors to media mentors to internal and external seminars and juries that help assess the students and provide them with critical feedback to refine and further their projects.
BANGALORE METRO RAIL CORPORATION PVT LTD Infrastructural Partner & Host Organization The Art in Transit project realized itself through the vision and constant guidance of Mr. U A Vasanth Rao (General Manager, Finance, BMRCL) and the consistent faith and support of Mr. Pradeep Singh Kharola (Managing Director, BMRCL). The BMRCL’s structural expert, Mr. Shameer Basha and its executive engineer, Ms. Chitra R, have been an integral part of all our decisions regarding installation work at the metro station. We’ve engaged with and received a range of other support, be it infrastructural support, connection to potential funders, safety training, and receiving the support of the ground staff at the station on a day-to-day basis, from the station controllers to the housekeeping staff to the security guards.
AMPLE TECHNOLOGIES Corporate Sponsor for Peenya Project Ample is a Bangalore-based technology solutions sales organisation that has evolved as one of the most preferred providers that connect leading technology suppliers to their customers. We’ve been extremely fortunate to receive several rounds of generous financial support from Ample in the form of its CSR initiative, allowing us to realize our vision for Peenya Station without compromise. The project could not manifested itself without the continuous support and faith of Ample’s director, Mr. Rajesh Narang.
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The metro is new to the city, and it’s so actively used by so many people. This was a great way to reach out to people in their everyday lives. When I finalized upon what I wanted to do for my project, with the amount of material I’ve used for my project, I’m so grateful for the sponsorship that we’ve gotten onboard. And I think this project sets a really huge example for what young artists and designers can put forward within the city. Aroushka D’mello, Student
Peenya has transformed from an agricultural base to an industrial base and now to a residential base. The people who use this station are those who live and work here. So it’s very important for them to be constantly reminded, in the form of art, the transformations and experiences this station and this place can hold. Mr. U A Vasanth Rao, General Manager - Finance (BMRCL)
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COLLABORATOR INDEX Srishti Administration
AIT Faculty
PDP Students: Be the City
Geetha Narayanan (Founder Director) Dharma Kannan (Executive Administrator) Sujaya Prabhu (Finance) Shefali Sengupta (Finance) Malliga (Finance) Ganesh Gibson (Finance)
Arzu Mistry (Team Lead) Amitabh Kumar (Team Lead) Samir Parker (Project Faculty) Agnishikha Choudhuri (Project Faculty) Evan Hastings (Project Faculty)
Ruchika Nambiar Reuben Samson Siddhanth Shetty Aditya Bharadwaj
Anjali Kanoria Atia Sen Avnit Kaur Guillaume Pugeaut Jaiwant Pradhan Janhavi Vyas Megha Beria Nayantara Joseph Pragnya Shankaran Sanjana B Raju Shashwath M M Tanya Singh Vridhhi Chaudhry
Final Project Students
Interim Faculty
Akshaya Zachariah Aroushka Jinelle D’mello Deepti Ramakrishnan Devika Shah Fabrice Grolaire Harleen Chatha Ishita Biswas Jaivardhan Channey Manush John Natasha Sharma Prateek Vatash Raj Palan Reuben Samson Ria Bajaj Ruchika Nambiar Shail Suneja Shambhavi Singh Siddhanth Shetty Veda Thozhur Kolleri
Aastha Chauhan Ajai Narendran Manasee Jog Sadhvi Jawa Manoj Dangoria David Bergé Amy Golding Ruchira Das Siddhartha Kararwal
AIT Research Assistants BMRCL Executives Pradeep Singh Kharola (Managing Director) U A Vasanth Rao (General Manager, Finance) Shameer Basha (Structural Expert) Chitra R (Executive Engineer P&P) Chavan B L Y (CE/CPRO) Munisamappa (DCE - Reach 3) Pranesha Rao (DGM RS) Shivanand K R (DCE (PP & C)) Shivayogi S K (Asst. Executive Engineer) Subramanya Gudge (DCE (D& UG))
Ample Technologies Rajesh Narang (Director) Gomathi Raju (Head of Finance & Logistics) Venkatesh Pandita Sheila Dias Prashanth Rao K
Vardaan (CSR Advisors) Anil Birla (Founder Director) Smita Kalappa (CEO) Jyoti Narula
Former Project Students Peenya Station Ground Staff Umesh Raichur (Station Controller) Ram (Station Controller) Ravi (Station Controller) Harish (Station Controller) Naveen (Station Controller) Sanjay (Station Controller) Gangadhar (Station Controller) Housekeeping staff E&M staff Customer Care staff Security staff
In-kind Support Khivraj Motors Karnataka Chemical Industries
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Alok Utsav Aditya Bharadwaj Anchana Kota Anusha Sharma Ayushya George Bijin Davis David Mckenzie Disha Bhardwaj Neetika Malik Pragya Joshi Prisila Netalkar Radhika Mantri Rahul Chacko Sarit Derasari Sayori Mukherjee Shreya Bhatia Shrish Bhadani Sidharta Guha Thakurta Sushant Passi Taarika John Tushar Satyanath Vrinda Gupta Anwesha Chakraborty
AIT Interim Students Anthony Richard Arputham Apoorva Maltesh Patil Apurva Kothari Eheeta Gurung Geethika Pramod Jessica Susan George Karishma BC Kritima Arora Kunal Suresh Menon Manu Sharma Matrena Martin Oren Sequeira Rachita Agarwal Radhika Motani Rahul Rai Rhea Suresh Iyer Riddhi Ravishankar Roshni Bhatia Saachi Narayan Sagarika Bhatia Sakshi Jain Sanatan Vatsayan Sanika Deshpande Serena Alam Shah Simran Shewani Sushim Ghatak Sushmita Goswami Ujjwal Parekh
Visiting Interim Students Aanchal Anil Bagalwadi Aayush Amit Bhingare Aayushi Govil Adithya Ravi Alisha Andrews Anahat Kaur Ankita Kabra Anushka Kalpesh Jain Anushree Chokappa Atia Sen Charvi Shrimali Devika G Dhruv Jesrani Gauri Nagpal Hardik Taneja Harini Muthamma Aiana Isha Rajesh Vora Jai Pradip Phansalkar Jeswin P George Karthika Sakthivel Kashika Kapoor Lakshmi Kakodkar Linda Angela Stauffer Maitreyee Aniruddha Kshirsagar Mansi Kiran Shah Meghna Menon Mohit Shukla Neha Balasaheb Shirkande Nishqa Rajesh Pillai Ojasvi Singh Pahi Gangwar Payal Atul Tanksale Prachi Nitin Oswal Pragnya Shankaran Pranati Prashant Desai Pratiti Rajesh Sadani Priyanka Jain Purvai Rai Purvi Agarwal Rajat Khurana Rhea Gupta Rhea Nambiar Ria Rajkumar Patel Ridhima Gugnani Rishika Agarwal Ruei Rajeev Shah Rushouti Charuchandra Kanade Sabari Venu Sabhyatha Rajashekar Sakshi Sharma Salonee Sandeep Vichare Saloni Narayan Sardessai Sanika Ushana Palsikar Saniya Vishwesh Shete Sanjana B Raju Sara Ahmed
Saumya Singh Saurabh Shailesh Bedarkar Shampa Saxena Simone Minesh Nirmal Sneha Suresh Stuti Bajaj Sumit Meena Sushmita Sanjay Hatte Tanvi Sandeep Bamb Twinkle Moolchandani Vaishali Jain Vidhi Vaghela
Primary Vendors/Fabricators Unique Engineers Metal Fabrication Chandru Enterprises Scaffolding & Fabrication Sendhamarai Engineering Aluminum Scaffolding Omkar Interior Designers Metal Fabrication DesignEARTH Build Natural Building & Landscaping Bethany Engineering Works Metal Fabrication S&S Fabs Installation JK Engineering Works Carpentry & Welding Welpac Large Format Printing Kolorkode Digital Printing Kapsons Glass House Laser and CNC Cutting Lamarions Lasercutting Janson Paints Paint Vendor Paint Palace Paint and Hardware Vendor Naresh Enterprises PVC Vendor Mahalaxmi Plastics Acrylic Vendor Patcha Steel Metal Sheet Vendor Sri Chandra Glassworks Metal Frame Vendor Kayson Vinyl Flooring Vendor Infra Moves Spray Paint Vendor Jyothi Glass & Plywoods Mirror Vendor Ganesh Panchal Carpenter Raghunath Carpenter Ramesh Electrician Stephen + M. Joseph Raj Painters Inchara Arts Sign Painter Shravan Carpenter + Welder
Short-term Collaborations DesignEARTH Build Urban Vision Creative Time Summit
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BOOK CREDITS Design & Layout
Ruchika Nambiar
Art in Transit Logo
Sagarika Bhatia
Writing Ruchika Nambiar
Peenya Station Maps
/Original Design /Version 2 /Version 3
Editing Arzu Mistry Reuben Samson Ruchika Nambiar Cover Photo
Prisila Netalkar Sagarika Bhatia, Kritima Arora Ruchika Nambiar
Reuben Samson
Photo Credits
Illustration/Visualisation Credits
Alok Utsav p1. p6-7. p12. p14. p23. p52. p124-125. Akshaya Zachariah p2. p4. p96-98. Reuben Samson p3. p5. p26. p128-131. Siddhanth Shetty p9. p10. p13. p31-32. p108-109. p126. p132-139. p141-142. p156159. p166-168. p177-178. p198-199. p201. p205. p209. p226. Aroushka D’mello p11. p18. p22. p117-118. p227. Neetika Malik p15. p76. Veda Thozhur Kolleri p16. p21. p35-41. p45-46. p55-58. p77. p80. Ruchika Nambiar p17. p27. p30. p33-34. p42. p51. p72. p74. p79. p81-87. p93. p99102. p110-113. p116. p119-123. p146-147. p160-165. p169. p180. p210. p217. p220221. p225. Devika Shah p19. p53-54. p59. Ishita Biswas p20. p75. p78. Samir Parker p24-25. p43. p47. p50. p67. p144. p222. p224. Shashwath MM p28. Natasha Sharma p29. p88-92. p94-95. p206-207. Fabrice Grolaire p44. Umeed Mistry p48. p68. p95. p170. p208. Shail Suneja p60-66. Ria Bajaj p69. p143. p145. p212-214. Harleen Chatha p70-71. p73. Prateek Vatash p103-107. Shambhavi Singh p114-115. Manush John p127. Karishma BC p140. p176. p179. p200. p202. Jaivardhan Channey p148-153. p203-204. Deepti Ramakrishnan p154-155. p218-219. Amy Golding p171-175. Linda Stauffer p181. Purvai Rai p182. Mihika Row p183. Dhruv Jesrani p184. Gauri Nagpal p185. Isha Vora p186. Vaishali Jain p187. Sanjana B Raju p188. Meghna Menon p189. Charvi Shrimali p190. Anushree Chokkappa p191. Karthika Shaktivel p192. Jai Phansalkar p193. Sara Ahmed p194. Srishti Interim Crew 2015 p195-197. Talitha Robert p215-216.
Veda Thozhur Kolleri i1. i14. Reuben Samson i2. i56-59. Alok Utsav i3. i13. i18. Manush John i4. i8. i52-55. Prisila Netalkar i5. Shreya Bhatia i6. Neetika Malik i7. Ruchika Nambiar i9. i43-44. i66. Radhika Mantri i10. Shambhavi Singh i11. i47-49. Devika Shah i12. i33-34. Ruchika Nambiar, David Mckenzie i15. Shambhavi Singh, Prateek Vatash i16. Siddhanth Shetty i17. Bijin Davis i19. Sushant Passi i20. Pragya Joshi i21. Aroushka D’mello i22. i50-51. Fabrice Grolaire i23. i26-28. Shail Suneja i24. i35-36. Veda Kolleri i25. Raj Palan i29-32. Harleen Chatha, Disha Bhardwaj i37. Harleen Chatha i38. Ishita Biswas i39-42. Prateek Vatash i45-46. Ria Bajaj i60-61. Jaivardhan Channey i62-65. Deepti Ramakrishnan i67-73.
Edited & designed by Ruchika Nambiar Cover photo credit Reuben Samson
Art in Transit: A project run by Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology in collaboration with Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Ltd and Ample Technologies