Sustainable fuel sign on recycle truck in New Delhi.
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Indian designer Mickey Bardava proposed a playful way to highlight the dangers of open defecation, drawing on Diwali fireworks packaging. Associating the familiar perils of explosive fireworks with the health hazards of exterior excretion – the text goes on to wish you a happy Diwali while declaring that the message has been ‘issued in public interest.’ Barvada cleverly remixes a locally relevant graphic style with a potent social message.
And check out a further oddity in Diwali fireworks packaging I spotted in Mumbai this week!
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Excreta, Et Cetera
Random Specific Musings from the Ramayana
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Illustrator Sanjay Patel has been getting a fair amount of cyber-attention of late. Earlier this year saw the release of his acclaimed book Ramayana: Divine Loophole – which graphically recounts the legendary Hindu epic.
Random factoid: Sanjay spent his formative years in a motel run by his Indian-born parents in San Bernadino, off Route 66. Specific factoid: These days he works as an animator at Pixar Studios. I hit Sanjay up to provide some further randomly specific insights from his latest book. He started out by highlighting that the Ramayana is, in fact, all about random meetings and chance encounters surrounding specific quests and heroic pursuits.
“In the spread called Family Tree I wanted to capture that randomness as Rama is introduced to the monkey and bear tribes. I was keen for it to look like abstract jungle wallpaper. The imagery owes a lot to inspiration from the late modernist Charley Harper.”
“Later on in the next spread, Search for Sita, the bears and monkeys are on the hunt for a specific person. That person of course is the princess Sita. Rama’s mission to find Sita brings order and focus to the chaos of the jungle.”
In the quest for Sita, Rama gets help from the likes of Hanuman and other cooperative characters while surmounting challenges from a slew of villainous types. Sanjay’s version leaps off the page in vivid drama and whimsical charm. Check out his interview with the good folks over at Grain Edit and Sanjay’s own site Ghee Happy. If you’re keen to get your hands on a copy of one of his covetable volumes – you can find them in the jungles of Amazon.
Backstory: My email exchange with Sanjay began with a humble note from my end letting him know that stationery had been misspelt on his website as stationary. This post has been brought to you by the letter E.
Related posts:
Bollywood Poster-wallas
Overlap: Intersections of Desi + Diasporic
[All images by Sanjay Patel – in case you haven't been paying attention]
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A selection of creative endeavors featuring SMS, social media and spam provide artful commentary on digital communication.
SMS Stitching – embroidered text messages track ebb and flow of modern romance.
Wildlife-Social Media Mash-up – blasé bird tweets on life in New York.
Spam One Liners – hand-lettered renderings inspired by junk mail subject lines.
Highlighting aspects of immediacy, attention and privacy – all three artists share a tendency to save what others may delete.
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Still Life, Smooth Moves
Writings on Walls
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Earlier this month I spent time in Delhi with my old pal Arti Sandhu, putting up our exhibition Overlap at the Mocha Arthouse. Arti and I have been intersecting across the globe for a decade now – in New Zealand, India, Hong Kong and the US. Sharing a fondness for hand-rendered, vernacular artforms, we conceived the show around our varied perspectives of Indianess – touching on the desi and diasporic, the traditional and typographic alongside explorations of language and locality.
My own work included two series which I designed and had executed by sign-writers in Ahmedabad and exhibited previously at the Glasgow School of Art. The English of India series came from noting that visitors to India are so often surprised by the amount of English one encounters – on the street, peppered through films and even in remote villages. I aimed to capture the localisation of the global spread of English through the flair of local sign-writing.
The second series, Bollywood Soul – A Vernacular Walk of Fame playfully created a set which displays divas and heralds heros of national cinema, employing local portraiture and typographic styles commonly used to decorate rickshaws. I collaborated with a local legend who earns his living painting rickshaw mudflaps from his roadside studio – and committed his brush to rubber shoe-soles for the project.
Arti grew up in an Army family which meant she covered a lot of ground in India from a young age. A love of drawing and customising her barbie to look more Indian led her study fashion at NIFT in Delhi and later in the UK. Since then she has lectured globally and is currently an assistant professor of Fashion Design in Chicago. Her artworks explore identity and migration and provide insightful perspectives on the eccentricities of the modern and mundane in India and abroad.
On annual visits home to India Arti began to notice the idiosyncratic qualities of everyday life which she had previously taken in her stride. She drew on these observations to create the ‘A’ is for Akshar series in which she re-visits her motherland and language while providing a visual commentary on India through the lens of a migrant.
Exploring cultural baggage and excess baggage, Arti’s Mahila Moments series is inspired by Madhubani folk art. Here she delves into the dilemmas of modern day India, fashion and migration with a love for line, pattern and repetition. Reminiscent of Ganjifa playing cards, the series crosses borders of locality and globalisation in an interplay of what Indian womanhood has come to mean at home and further afield.
Included in the exhibition was a large format poster by New Zealand-based graphic designer and typographer Anton Hart. A few years back he landed up in Bombay on a work sabbatical. Like many before him and many to come, he was smitten. But the touristy tabernacles of Agra and Rajasthan were not what caught his eye. Instead he was enraptured by the truck painters of Bombay and farther afield. His Horn Please typeface and ornaments are a tribute to their flamboyant creativity.
The show Overlap: Intersections of Desi and Diasporic is hosted by the good folk at Box Design & Research and will be up at Delhi’s Mocha Arthouse, DLF Promenade, Vasant Kunj through March, 2010.
Related posts:
Viva Vernacular
Indian Street Graphics (Flickr)
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Visitors to India are frequently enchanted by the spirited decoration of trucks which traverse the nation. We are immediately drawn to the quaintness of English phrases like Horn Please which are commonly emblazoned on the rear of commercial vehicles.
However we often miss the assortment of Hindi phrases – the most common of which reads Mera Bharat Mahan (मेरा भारत महान) meaning My India is Great. This patriotic declaration was popularised by former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in his campaigning efforts to evoke a spirit of modernity across the nation. It went on to become a favoured proclamation of Indian cricket fans. The slogan prevalently graces the tailgates of trucks which cross state and cultural boundaries in a diversely painted salute to national pride.
Sometimes the sentiment is translated into English…
And other times things get a bit jumbled…
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Indian Street Graphics (Flickr)
Street Art Gets Behind the Wheel
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Commanding commuter attention in New Zealand’s capital city is the Go Wellington Graffiti Bus that was launched earlier this year as part of the vibrant Cuba Street Carnival. While graffiti is often viewed through the lens of vandalism, its defenders claim that it creates a sense of belonging and expertise while providing a vehicle for publicly expressing personal, social and political viewpoints.
A chance meeting in a Wellington alley-way brought together the Goethe Institute and Auckland-based aerosol artists Cut Collective. This evolved into a collaboration with German collective Via Grafik resulting in an exhibition and panel discussions at Wellington’s New Dowse gallery and a live event at the carnival during which the bus was given its street-wise makeover.
By showcasing planned, commissioned and intricate works, exhibited urban artforms are placed on a higher plane than vandalism but reference to public space still seems relevant. Carnival organiser Chris Morely-Hall supported the idea that street art be hailed both in and outside the gallery context. Last year’s Street Art show at London’s Tate Modern similarly acknowledged a need to present works by urban artists outdoors rather than merely confine them to gallery interiors.
With urban surfaces becoming increasingly corporatised the bus also raises issues around the dynamics of disruption and motivations for street art.
“We are bound by our own decision-making framework that is based on pretty robust ethical values. We are business owners and ratepayers, so we are respectful of others in that position. By the same token, being contributing members of society in that way, we also feel we have some right of reply within a public space dominated by advertising imagery and messages.”
– Cut Collective member Ross Liew (aka Trust Me) Source: Unlimited
Go Wellington were amazingly cooperative in meeting my request to pull the bus out of circulation so that I could shoot it. While waiting at the expansive Kilbirnie bus depot I came across a driver who had been at the wheel of the bus on a number of occasions. He mentioned that it certainly gets a lot of attention on the street – good, bad and bewildered. Wherever I’ve come across it I’ve noted that while many people smile as they view this creative contrast to the usual corporate bus advertising, others frown at the irreverent path its cuts through Wellington streets. If a key role of art is to pose questions the Graffiti Bus certainly qualifies – as it drives debate and salutes skills through the city’s main arteries.
Related articles:
Writing on Walls
Indo-French Street Skills
Melbourne Karachi Tram Project [external]
Note: more imagery follows in the Comments Section.
Respect to all mentioned in the article plus Lisa Mönchmeyer from the Goethe Institute, Flox + Component of Cut Collective, Go Wellington’s Siobhan O’Donovan + Darek Koper and my main man and personal bus driver – Alan.
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Brilliant to note that the cover of this month’s issue of Creative Review Magazine (UK) was created as a collabration between dynamic Mumbai design house Grandmother and local taxi-transformers Swami Art on a real taxi on Indian soil.
“For any design-aware visitor, Mumbai’s yellow and black taxis, which constitute a major part of the city’s horrendous traffic, are a wondrous sight. The majority are richly decorated with a litany of the driver’s favourite things: like a MySpace page on wheels. The sacred and profane rub along on rear windscreens, wings and bumpers as visual references to gods mingle with film titles, western brand logos and complex geometric patterns. At night, these vivid forms dazzle under street lights and car headlamps. For our April issue, we commissioned our own Mumbai taxi.”
High praise to CR for featuring documentation of the fascinating process of vehicle customisation and for giving credit where credit’s due – to these unsung heros of the megacity’s dense visual texture.
It all brings back fond memories of my own collaboration with Indian graphic-wallahs a few years back which was exhibited at the Glasgow School of Art in 2007. Hollywood has its Walk of Fame which displays its divas and heralds its heros on the pavements of Sunset Boulevard. The exhibition sought to playfully create a Bollywood version employing local portraiture and typographic styles called Bollywood Soul: A Vernacular Walk of Fame.
I collaborated with local legend Bobby Solanki and his brother Ramesh and son Chetan – a talented family team who work on the roadside in the Old City in Ahmedabad and are kept busy six days a week customising rickshaws with flamboyant style that attracts drivers from far reaches of the sprawling city.
You can check out images from my Bollywood Soul exhibition on Flickr or read more about Indian street graphics on my previous post.
Related articles:
Indocentric: Typocentric
Indo-French Street Skills
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