Our cover art is a photograph of a Mumbai train painted in conjunction
with the January meeting of the World Social Forum (WSF) in the
city. WSF organizers and Open Circle ( http://www.opencirclearts.org/about.htm
), a Mumbai based artists collective, rented the “vast steel canvas”
of the Mumbai railways to give artists an opportunity to work
on a public space that is integrated into the life of the city.
This is a rare opportunity in a context where the dominant political
economy of the art world ensures that many artists find it difficult
to sustain their craft while resisting commercial imperatives
and de-politicized terrains of aesthetic engagement – where art
is ‘for’ private galleries and wealthy collectors, advertising
conglomerates and other ‘patrons’ of art as mere commodity.
lines understands this initiative as an attempt to conceive
of the Mumbai tracks as itself a massive metropolitan gallery;
to conceive of aesthetic engagement by producers and ‘consumers’
of art in terms of dialogue and exchange, inspiration and challenge.
As every train pulls in and out of a station, or whizzes through
the city as metro-gallery, it may have helped catalyze an opportunity
to interpret, question and revisit issues such as the war in Iraq,
the struggle around the Narmada Dam, the feminist movement, the
genocide in Gujarat, the Dalit movement and so on – issues that
also preoccupy the work of Open Circle artists/WSF conversations/the
Mumbai resistance and, last but not least (!!), the pages of lines.
For more about this initiative see:
http://web.mid-day.com/news/city/2003/december/72003.htm.
The photograph was taken by Aaron Moore; For Moore’s analysis
of WSF see the article in the current issue.
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