The Evolution of Street Art in Hyderabad over 90 Days
Ok. Let me start by admitting two things. One, I am terribly
biased when it comes to anything to do with Kalakriti Art Gallery. Two, in spite
of about 4 decades of exposure to advertising art of the highest order I do not
pretend to be an authority of any sort when it comes to matters of art and shamelessly
admit that sensitivity to art is quite possibly a missing characteristic of
mine.
Which is why I had no hesitation to opine recently, that the
street art that Hyderabad was invaded by during the Global Empowerment Summit,
was nothing short of disastrous, identical to grotesque, and ugly to the core.
I hoped that the Telugu Meet which followed soon after would
spark off some culturally more relevant imagery but that too was a balloon
burst by several artistic pricks (if you’ll pardon the pun).
So when I heard that Kalakriti was involved with the
authorities and St+art India in beautifying a hidden layer of Hyderabad, I was
intrigued and quite relieved. Nothing that Kalakriti did could ever be
tasteless.
When a sneak preview let us on to the secret that it was the
Maqtha that had been chosen for streetartification I thought to myself that
this must be because the previous two occasions had robbed the city of any more
canvases. I mean, come on…every wall, every crevice, every corner and what have
you had been bombarded by the shit art (I’m sorry, I shall not refer to it as
Street Art)…so if anyone wanted space to display their art, they had to look
for newer spaces, for better or for worse.
And quite frankly I saw some kind of poetic justice in the
choice of location. Because as I am sure you are aware, most of the city’s ‘beautification’
had been done only on the Trump Corridor. The rest of Hyderabad was left
unfairly undisturbed.
So to shift from the classy banjara/jubilee/madhapur/gachibowli
belt to the area that American Authors would perhaps call ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ was
sensible and quite laudable.
While thanks to social media and the fairly extensive
coverage that the endeavour received, I vaguely knew what to expect, I also knew
that there could be nothing to match a personal visit.
I would have loved to do a walk through, but for reasons
that need not be explained, I could only venture a drive by.
From the entrance, to the directions, to the splashes of
color that greeted my sight, I knew that this was all in a different league
altogether. The art was cleaner. The lines were sharper. The graphics were
infinitely more positive.
What grew on me however was a sense of disappointment that
firstly, this was all being done in an area that 9 out of 10 Hyderabadis and 1
out of a million visitors would never have seen, and nor were they likely to in
the near future.
The second was that the palette used was, contrary to my
expectations, quite foreign. There were colors that intruded into the space.
Patterns that shouted an alien tongue. And forgive me for thinking so, but they reminded me too much of the art direction
in Telugu Movies in the early days when Mithai Pink and Pista Green danced with
Canary Yellow and Cobalt Blue.
From my perspective there was no merging or fitting in. This
was assault, pure and simple. A Bludgeoning of Artistivity onto a mute subjugated
citizenry. There was no story, no recalling of roots, no echoing the sentiments
of the people who live in that space…most of them people of marginal means who
were gifted the illegally grabbed land by an iconic politician whose vote bank
this area still perhaps is.
To me it looked like a few children were asked to share a
box of crayons and because they could not learn to share, each one created a
shade all his very own. The whole ‘basti’, as a result, looked like a canvas of
survival stories slapped with success collages. And that made me very uncomfortable.
Ok. Alright. I accept that I have no business commenting
about what I know hardly anything about. I am ready to be castigated. To be
corrected. To be educated. And if you are a particularly good friend of mine, I
won’t even mind if you tell me to shut up.
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