Delhi, Mumbai gear up for 2nd edition of PUBLICA public art fest

PanARMENIAN.Net - After the resounding success of the 2013 edition, PUBLICA, the public arts festival, returns to Delhi in 2016 in a bigger, more engaging and more international form. The second edition of the festival is scheduled to take place in Delhi and Mumbai from 23 January - 29 February 2016, Art Daily reports.

The 2013 edition engaged over 2 million people during a month in Delhi, and this edition hopes to reach even greater audiences. PUBLICA 2016 has invited Indian and International artists to produce works to feature in the festival under this year’s curatorial theme, ‘Touch’. Artists will make site-specific works responding to the local context and guided by the festival’s theme. The finished works will be placed in high footfall areas around Delhi and for the first time Mumbai, in an attempt to build on the outreach of the first festival and touch as many people as possible.

The 2016 edition will be spread over fifteen to twenty indoor and outdoor high footfall venues ranging from cultural centres, to bustling street markets, metro stations, parks and teeming shopping malls. The city will become the backdrop for a series of visual and performance-based installations created by a range of artists who will create visually engaging, dynamic pieces of public art. Artists in PUBLICA 2016 include Gigi Scaria, Anant Mishra, Deepjyoti Kalita, Krishna Murari, Tushar Joag, Jasone Bilbao, Bhuwal Prasad and Raktim Parashar.

The idea of the festival is to remove artworks from their limiting traditional setting of museums and galleries and put them in view of broader audiences to try and drive engagement in the arts and promote cultural change at grass roots. Venues for artworks in this edition include, Indira Gandhi International Airport, Shanti Path, Nehru Park, Children's Park, Select Citywalk Saket, DLF Emporio, Vasant Kunj, Nizamuddin Basti, India Habitat Centre and Cyber Hub Gurgaon.

Surbhi Modi, Founder and Chief Curator, PUBLICA and Floodlight Foundation, “At Floodlight we feel strongly about the need to support public art projects in an attempt to enrich the cultural landscape of our cities but also expose more people to art. Through our installations as well as the extensive educational outreach, we hope to make a lasting impression on our ever expanding audiences and build support to take PUBLICA to new cities and new audiences on every edition.”

Educational outreach is a fundamental pillar of the programme and PUBLICA will include several partnerships including; ArtReach where leading street artist and founder of Street Art Festival, Anpu Varkey, will paint a large graffiti wall of a leading Delhi school along with school and underprivileged children; And Safe Educate (an arm of Safe Express) with live painting of a mobile container school by artist in residence, Bhuwal Prasad. PUBLICA would also like to encourage the public to vote for their favourite work which will be donated to the city for display for a year in the hope that it will encourage a groundswell of support towards more public art in our cities.