There’s never a dull moment in Chennai’s cultural carousel. The Goethe-Institut Chennai recently concluded the street art festival, ‘Conquer the Concrete’, by roping in artists from India and abroad, adding more colour to it. Chennai now has its own private art collection of sorts on the walls that have long been smeared with political and cinema posters. The vibrant street art on the city’s walls has made it more lively and dynamic.
Among the artists who contributed to this unique project is Lars Niepuhr from Berlin who calls himself Base 23. He draws his inspiration from a wide array of sources such as the psychedelic art of the 1960s to the underground comics from the 1970s. Combining these influences into his unique graphic style, Base 23 displays his passion for detail in large murals as well as on canvas. Vibrant colours are an important aspect of his work. Painting at the Egmore Railway station, he says, “It is special to paint a station. There is a colourful chaos involved. It has a very positive effect. The environment (at such a site) can be made more vibrant and not (be) simply filled with commercial advertisements,” he adds.
“Street art is a democratic art form which is still rare in Chennai,” says Georg Zolchow, the curator of the project. Currently residing in Madrid, Zolchow is an artist. The concrete walls were painted by artists from across the globe. “The aim behind the project was only to portray urban development and its associated challenges in Chennai but also to focus upon the need for public participation,” he adds. In short, ‘art’ will be used as a way to establish vibrant communities- thereby bringing creative vision and aesthetic potential to everyday life in the city.
The 18-day project was held with support from Chennai Corporation and Southern Railways among other collaborators. Viewers got an insight on what street art is and can be. Some of the artists who used their spray cans and brushes across the city are Anpu Varkey from New Delhi, Amitabh Kumar from Bengaluru, foreign artists Axel Void from Miami and Okuda from Madrid among others.
Among the young minds taking up the art form is 25-year-old Shilo Shiv Suleman. She is involved in setting up community art projects and groups that not only get people to appreciate and create street art in their surroundings, but also use it to bring socially relevant issues in India to the forefront. She also manages Fearless, a community of artists, activists, photographers and filmmakers who use art to speak out against gender violence as an attempt to redefine fear, feminism and what it means to be fearless. The group came up after the December 2012 Delhi gang rape case. Travelling across the country, Suleman works with women communities and local artists to collaborate on murals together which spin out their own tales. For example, during the Kumbh Mela, where the number of women tend to be few, she painted on the theme of reclaiming feminine divinity.
The motive is to initiate a dialogue among the viewers. However, the artist warns that she has to be careful about what she is writing, as it always opens up a deeper conversation among the viewers. In Chennai, after watching several Tamil films, Suleman has decided to focus on the theme of women’s portrayal on-screen. “Gender and consent in Tamil cinema will be the main theme behind my works. (I will focus on) how the gender dynamic plays out,” she adds. Meanwhile, as she continues to work in Chennai, she will be collaborating with one of the hoarding painters, MP Dakshna. MP Dakshana has been in the business of painting hoardings since 1989 and is among Chennai’s most talented and successful artists. Well-versed in the art of making huge hand painted cutouts, he is renowned for his dramatic use of colour and state-of the-art compositional skills. Dakshana believes that his own art will be taking a new turn in the collaboration with artists from USA, Germany and Spain. This collaboration of hoarding painters and European artists also saw college students take to painting the city walls on themes such as role of women in the city, maps of Chennai, kolams and buses on the walls at bus stops.