Street Art Festival: Colouring Delhi’s Urban Villages Walls

Natural environment is the best place where one can experience the Street Art. Seeing a new muralor a piece of art on one of the street one is familiar with. The Steet Art Movement in India is a new

milestone with St.ART. The St. ART in Delhi is the biggest street art festival the country has ever

seen.

St.ART Delhi is a joint-venture between Indian & International street artists who are taking over

massive wall spaces and are changing the urban city’s landscape into a permanent walking art

gallery.

The festival has more than 60 artists from across the world converging in the Indian capital and

transforming the bare-old gray walls of the city into a walk-in art gallery. The festival began on the

18th of January, 2014 and the art work was open for exhibition from the 2nd to the 28th, February.

The month long exhibition showcased selected works of major street artists from around the

world, and gave a deeper insight into the phenomenon of Street Art and its history and progression.

The festival was purposefully coincided with the India Art Fair in Delhi. Its organizers hoped that

the simultaneity could drive a rare conversation among the practitioners of street art, those of more

traditional forms of art and the common people of the city.

Two years ago, Mr. Hanif Kureshi and Anpu Varkey, a prolific painter, succeeded in getting a bunch

of their artist friends together in one of the urban villages, Khirki, for what in retrospect was Delhi’s

first spontaneous street art festival. Since then, that group called upon friends, who called upon

other friends, to create this year’s street art festival.

“What we’re doing here is unprecedented,” said Hanif Kureshi, the 30-year-old creative director

of the festival. “Imagine one guy from Taiwan and another from Germany working on a wall in

Shahpur Jat. We want to get people to believe in it, while also pushing the street art scene to do

something that will put Delhi on the map.”

Each artist was individually responsible for gaining permission from the owners of the building,

and Mr. Kumar and other artists said that has been an interesting process, unique to the practice of

curate street art.

“People have been reasonable, for the most part,” said Mr. Kumar. “If they don’t like what we do,

we’ve offered to paint back over it. We’re also using weatherproof paint so that helps insulate their

homes.”

This festival not only gives an opportunity to graffiti painters from across the world to paint and

exhibit their talent on the wall but also gives a new and unique identity to the grayscale and old

walls of the city, making it more vibrant and attractive. Truly making it a walk-in art gallery.

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