The recently concluded Mumbai Urban Art Festival brought together a plethora of artists and diverse practitioners to create interdisciplinary projects including landmark murals, experiential exhibitions, immersive installations and public programming across key venues. Exploring different areas of the city, the festival offered opportunities for rediscovering lesser-known paths and forgotten narratives. From having mindful accommodations for people with disabilities and LGBTQIA+ representation to braille catalogues and animal pods for stray animals— The Mumbai Urban Art Festival 2022-2023 put inclusivity in the foreground to ensure an accepting environment for all. We sat down with Giulia Ambrogi, co-founder St+Art India and Vasudhaa Narayanan, curator to discuss all things art and inclusivity.
ELLE: What were some significant moments at MUAF 2022-2023?
Vasudhaa Narayanan (VN): For us to do the Mumbai Urban Arts Festival with one of the locations as Sassoon Docks was especially significant because the community is so important to us. The men and women of the dock coming into the exhibition spaces and providing their own experiences and perspectives on the installations was really empowering. Several walks were led by AWM in Marathi which also encouraged the local community to actively engage with the art. In addition to that, we did a couple of community-led programs that supported expressive dance forms, rap battles, flash mobs etc. In terms of art installations as part of Light Night Colaba, the Luzinterruptus installation that was on view from 11 to 15 January at Evelyn house was really powerful. We also had several walkthroughs with BMC schools and other schools in the city to encourage students and young adults to actively participate and contribute to the public art heritage of the city.
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ELLE: What does inclusivity in the art space mean to you?
Giulia Ambrog (GA): When you have spaces such as museums that may be free of cost, that doesn’t really necessarily mean that they are inclusive in nature. A lot of times it’s not a matter of financial accessibility, it’s a matter of how you feel towards an environment and if you feel like that environment is open to you or not. So accessibility is way beyond your financial capacity of affording a ticket. There are several obstacles like a lack of basic awareness of what a gallery is, where it is, and whether is it free of cost. But even if you are aware of all of it, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you would step in feeling comfortable by being, let’s say, barefoot or right out of your night shift with perhaps not the best smell on your body. What is also being discussed all over the world is also how to create different centres, meaning how to decentralize the centre. The point is to bring art where art is perhaps not expected or not supposed to be allowed, to bring art in places of work, in places of life and social demographics that usually don’t feel comfortable or don’t have access to art and culture. Essentially we’re trying to expose new audiences to art.
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ELLE: How did MUAF ensure inclusivity?
VN: Inclusivity transcends social hierarchy, it transcends gender norms, it transcends able bodies. I think that’s something that we have really tried our best to integrate within the scope of the festival. In terms of making the venue accessible for all we’ve had ramps installed in several locations of the building, we collaborated with Siddhant Shah’s ‘Access for All’ to make sure that people with disabilities can access the venues including tactile artwork, sign language workshops etc. In addition to that, we’ve collaborated and worked with several artists who belong to the LGBTQIA+ community. Introducing these new narratives within spaces like the fishing dock also opens the people of the dock to these narratives, which makes it a cross-exchange of ideas.
ELLE: Could you take me through the works of the LGBTQIA+ artists on board?
VN: The idea was to encourage new narratives to emerge within the exhibition space and also learn more about the possibilities of different queer realities, especially within a curatorial and art-led practice. We worked with the Gaysi family for a gender-neutral bathroom, which is called ‘Mirror Mirror, On The Wall, Do You See Us All?’, we worked with Koshy Brahmatmaj, Shripad Sinnakaar— who is a very young writer and poet from Dharavi, Aravani Art Project— a transgender women’s collective from Bangalore, Ad Minoliti— who’s an Argentinian artist, Durga Gawde, Sheena Maria Piedade. All of them work in different capacities in the arts and they really helped shape crucial spaces within the exhibition. They’ve challenged several social structures and have really allowed for these new narratives to emerge.
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ELLE: Could you tell us a little more about the workshops conducted at MUAF this year? What was the response like?
VN: Within the context of inclusive workshops, Gaysi curated ‘The Sea and I’ which was a performative exploration of identity within the city and it really centred different bodies in the city through different ways of performance. We had a gender play workshop for children which was also curated by Gaysi and was led by Teya. It encouraged gender play through a series of free-flowing questions and challenged heteronormative gender norms through a short story. We also had a journaling workshop that was led by Pearl D’Souza and Siddhi Surte that encouraged moments of self-reflection and asked people about their personal relationship with Mumbai and what it means to centre your body within the larger framework of a city. In addition to that, Sheena Maria Piedade curated this space called ‘How to Do Nothing’ taking from Jenny Odell’s book of the same name where she did several workshops over the course of the last week of the festival like a stitching circle. ‘Slow Down for Art’ workshop led the participants through the exhibition to look at art in a different way and interpret it through colours, shapes and intuition. We collaborated with Rachna’s Funclub for a lot of the children’s workshops as well as the Museum of Solutions where they held decoupage workshops and dioramas and worked with local materials, fishnets and old boxes. Essentially teaching children about recycling at a very young age.
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ELLE: What do you hope to see more of in the future of art and what is the vision for MUAF?
VN: We hope to continue creating spaces that are open to the public and encourage people from the same city to come to parts of the city they’ve never seen. I think that’s something that St+art India Foundation has been really pivotal in introducing within the public art space in the country. Considering that the motto for St+art India Foundation is ‘Art for all’, we want to make art accessible and inclusive. I would love to see more diverse audiences across class, caste and social strata coming together and engaging with each other through these community-led programs and through the art.
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GA: I really hope that in India there could be more attention dedicated to art but in a more serious way by recognising how creative Industries are incredibly important for the general growth of our country. If you look at France, they’ve made art and culture one of their like main selling points, it’s their second income. This is something that India with its centuries of incredible history and traditions should really recover and re-understand its possibilities. I also really hope that it’s not a one-shot sort of spectacle, but it becomes a more collective effort from us as professionals but also different stakeholders like journalists, government and patrons. From our side, I hope that we continue to break through uncomfortable realities because that’s when you can really change something. The uncomfortable smell of Sassoon makes it so visceral that you are obliged to or almost forced to get out of your comfort zone. That’s when you really become more porous and are encouraged in a raw manner to listen more and open up more. I personally love Sassoon immensely and I would love to see it as a permanent hub for art and culture, but I also really hope that we can extend to other areas of the city to keep analyzing the context and the spirit of the time with renewed conversations.
