Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology

Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology collaborated with prominent local and international artists and designers to bring to the City the theme of Fear and Gender in Public Space as a series of performative, visual and sonic artistic explorations and interventions which will culminated in a public show at 1, Shanthi Road Gallery.

SOCIAL ART IN THE PUBLIC REALM

The artists and designers have been working since January 14 in tandem with students of the Srishti in this pedagogical-cum-artistic project which was coordinated by Radha Chandrashekaran and Geetanjali Sachdev, Srishti faculty. Their ambition is to investigate international perspectives on art in the public realm and to create a global network on the present theme.
This collaboration is part of Srishti’s pedagogical endeavors to broaden possibilities for student engagement in social action through an understanding of various modes of knowing and using newer forms of media. The Fear and Gender project is being carried out at Srishti as part of the school's current semester curriculum to explore the nature of learning experiences that lead to agency and participation by students in improving the social, cultural and ecological spaces that they inhabit.
Through encounters with the city's architecture and society designers, the power of artistic practice to research and affect civic concerns is explored by developing personal and collaborative understandings and practices.

This collaborative project is inspired by earlier workshops on the same theme conducted in Columbia, Sweden and South Africa by the Swedish artist-and-curator duo Sissi Westerberg and Veronica Wiman of LAND Contemporary Art Practices.

The first such collaborative, public exercise in Bangalore was carried out at the Cubbon Park on January 18th. Artists Karoline H. Larsen (Denmark), Ana Paula Albé (Brazil), Richard Widerberg (Sweden) and Vinayak Das (India) and Srishti students invited people to take part in transformative actions at selected sites in the park. Participants brought their personal experiences of public space into a net of collective creative actions - expressing joy, strength, masculinity versus feminity and beauty in this particular city space.

One of the exercises carried out at the site included female students braiding each others' hair as an act of reclaiming public space in their own feminine way. The students then asked passing boys and men whether they wanted their hair done as both men and women should feel at freedom to express a sense of individuality and joy in public spaces.

In another intervention, Liz Kueneke used Sigma Mall on Cunningham Road and Coles Park to “embroider Bangalore's Urban Fabric”. Surrounded by an collection of portable sewing materials, Liz and her student collaborators invited passersby to sew in their experiences of happiness and fear on an embroidered map of Bangalore.

Other participants in the project also include Zeenath Hasan (India/ Sweden), artists Liz Kueneke (Spain/ USA), Jatin Vidyarthi (India), Mangala Anebermath (India) and Vera Maeder (Denmark). Maraa, a Bangalore based media collective, is documenting the art interventions.

All activities and venues proposed are documented on the blog: http://zeeniac.net/fearandgender-bangalore and http://fearandgender.blogspot.com/