Art in Transit

A public art, design and pedagogy project based in Bangalore, India

How can we make the Bangalore metro relevant to its context? How can we humanize the mammoth alien forms of metro stations that now dot our landscape and link them to the communities that house them? How do you know where you are in Bangalore city, when Hennur looks just like Sarjapur? What does place have to do with our everyday interactions and presence? How can we make Bangalore a learning city?

These are some questions the Art in Transit Project has been asking and trying to answer through our practice.

A lenticular installation by The Story of, depicting the changing nature of Bangalore from a Garden City to a metropolis at Cubbon Park Metro Station

Art in Transit is a public art, design and pedagogic initiative that seeks to develop a sense of belonging and stimulate dialogue between people and the urban spaces they inhabit through art-based research & interventions in public spaces. Situated between the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology and the metro-rail corporation of Bangalore city, Art in Transit is a threshold space, that creates opportunities for students, artists, writers, poets, urban practitioners and the public to engage with the city through the process of continuous learning. The project is grounded in site-specific, place-based research and practice. The locative nature of each metro station is important and the neighbourhood, history, social character, community collaborations and ecology that surround a station, all feed into our research and practice.

In the background is Colours of Peenya, an installation by 4th Year student, Aroushka Jinelle D’mello made in 2014. Drawing from a vast and meticulously generated colour palette for Peenya, the piece forges a subtle and ephemeral link between the metro station and its community by reflecting the diversity of the local visual palette. The staircase in front of the installation is being used as a performance space by Srishti students from the 2015 Interim Semester, facilitated by artists Mansee Jog and Amy Goldine, performing stories of the everyday life of Peenya at the Peenya Metro Station

Students in their 4th year set up a studio at the Cubbon Park Metro Station.

The Lilliput Proletariat by Ruchika Nambiar, aims at illuminating the strangely pure, almost dystopian quality of Peenya’s industrial area by contrasting it against the kind of imagery one often associated with the notion of ‘development’ in the form of a 2D layered miniature diorama.

By using metro-stations as the public site for inquiry, the project naturally engages with the tensions of a city infrastructure project, government partners and the fact that the Bangalore Metro has been complicit in environmental damage and the displacement of communities on one hand and a much needed effective and efficient public transportation system on the other. The metro, therefore, stands as a ripe contradiction within the city which offers us a great opportunity for engaging in complexity through pedagogy and practice.

A glimpse of the Memory Maps workshop, a non-ticketed collaborative ‘workshop-in-progress’ designed and facilitated by Aliyeh Rizvi and Arzu MIstry in response to this transient city. It invited new and old residents to collectively create and share memory maps that trace their connections to Bangalore through particular experiences of love, sadness, excitement and even frustration as they engage with this changing city.

De’c’art, a moving cart installation that senses pollution and weather data wherever it is parked. It uses VR to teleport people to different parts of Bangalore to experience the weather and pollution of that area. The idea is to make people aware of how they themselves are changing the ecology of Bangalore.

Art in Transit (AiT) is beginning this publication on Medium to make our process visible and contribute to dialogue about urban creative practice, by sharing themes, challenges and approaches of our every day interventions in a public art and pedagogic space. Our key philosophy is that education is best experienced and performed in the real world and that learning is life-long and not contained in educational institutions. With this intent, AiT facilitates projects with students and faculty across the Srishti institution and continues to partner with local, national and international artists through courses, artist residencies, research projects, public workshops, community events and festivals. Through our publications, we invite diverse voices from students to artists, public participants to government officials to exchange and develop ideas situated within this context.

As a project in public practices, Medium would be a unique platform for us to engage with a new set of audiences, that would extend and inform our practice and other public practices both offline and online.

Festival of Stories, a bi-monthly platform where different visions, histories and practices of artists, students and community organisations come together in dialogue with each other. Through Medium, we want to generate a resource pool to showcase this process-based approach that could inform students, institutions, practitioners around the globe.

Festival of Proposition, initiated by Yash Bhandari, is a Public Call to create meaningful interventions in the Cubbon Park Metro Station. It welcomes ideas that are looking at the system, functioning, experience and aesthetics of the Metro Station.

Devika Shah presents her prototype and concept of Stories Behind the Door to the Managing Director and engineers of the Bangalore Metro.

Workshops on local history with historian Aliyeh Rizwi at Cubbon Park Metro Station

Abhimanyu Ghimiray’s painting at Chickpete Metro Station celebrating the people of the market that come from east and west, north and south to sell ice golas and idlis, plastic and steel, fruits and flowers at the point where the Chickpete meets the Doddapete.

This Art in Transit initiative is facilitated by the Srishti Institute of Art,Design and Technology Bangalore, in collaboration with the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation (BMRCL). Since July 2014, Srishti has collaborated with BMRCL with a pilot project at the Peenya Metro Station, and long term research and implementation projects at Cubbon Park Metro and Chikpete Metro Stations in Bangalore. In 2019, Art in Transit joins other city partners to guide the Metro Neighbourhood Initiative Project, extending to Rajajinagar, Vijaynagar, Lalbhag and Indiranagar Stations.

You can visit our website here

Watch videos of Festival of Stories here

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