Out of the box

On a sunny winter morning, I take an auto to the Inland Container Depot (ICD), in Tughlakabad. Spread over 55 acres, it employs 10,000 people and receives over 1,000 trucks full of containers every day, carrying goods that power large chunks of northern and western India.

News reports once described it as the ‘toxic heart of South Delhi’. This industrial landscape is grey and overflowing with rubbish. Despite its proximity to the wealthy boroughs of South Delhi, it bears no resemblance to the green enclaves a couple of kilometres away.

The reason for my visit is the opening of WIP, short for ‘Work In Progress’, a street art show organised by the St+Art India Foundation. It is an ongoing project where street artists from across India and abroad are transforming a hundred shipping containers by painting gigantic murals, graffiti, typography and other forms of visual art over and inside them.

My first view of this large-scale art is sudden. It’s a long drive into the depths of the ICD, with bare walls all around. For a while, I can’t figure out how to locate the show. All I can see for a time are vehicles and workers doing their job. I stop to ask a man in uniform where I can find the show, and as he points to the right, I see a pink geometric-patterned entrance, so large that I feel silly for having missed it.

I have been promised a walking tour by the organisers, but my introduction to this monumental art is quite without context. The first thing that I see is a giant astronaut in a silver suit with a reflective visor on its helmet, painted on an undulating surface of six containers stacked one atop another. On another side, a golden-yellow mythical creature towers on two stacked containers. As I walk further in, more art reveals itself. Each piece, on a different container, is startlingly different in style and sensibility: a gorgeous mural of a young boy’s face, a dark container with poetry painted in calligraphy all around it, a very large piece at the back, depicting what looks like a palace.

The experience of each individual piece changes as I keep walking. What starts out as a full view of the painted boy’s face, morphs into only his eyes, foregrounded by a large pop art hamsa: a palm with an eye at its centre. Elsewhere, the word ‘Breathe’ stencilled against a long white wall in stark black is swallowed up by other containers and a little later, becomes the word ‘The’. The discrete pieces constantly coalesce into something else entirely, depending on where you’re standing.

By the time I start my curated tour, I’m quite disoriented by the shifting perspectives. My guide is Giulia Ambrogi, co-founder and curator at St+Art. She puts each piece in context by naming the artists behind the works, their styles and their treatment of the containers. This is how I find out that the mural of the boy, by the Indian artist Anpu Varkey, depicts her brother. Or that a particularly beautiful container, depicting what appears to be a cosmic egg, is by an Italian artist, Agostino Iacurci, playing a visual pun on the fact that that particular container was used to transport eggs. In fact, many of the artists have responded to their immediate environment.

A particularly striking example of this is the piece by artist Amitabh Kumar, depicting a decapitated animal. It plays with dimensions in its representation of the animal’s form, sinews and skin. The effect is that of a unified whole when you stand back, and disjointed pieces the closer you come to it.

At the venue, he is in the process of painting the animal’s head on a separate container. When I ask him what inspired the piece, he replies, “There’s a huge, dead garbage dump here which you can’t use any more. I wanted to create a dead beast in response to it. So I painted this animal with its head hacked off. I wanted to paint the fallen head while interacting with people who’ve come to view the festival.”

The performative aspect of the festival separates it from a standard gallery. The other thing that is radically different, is, of course, the setting of this exhibition. One of the stated aims of the foundation is to celebrate ‘art for everyone’. This isn’t just gimmick, for St+Art has imagined a much bigger audience than the regular suspects who frequent art galleries: ICD’s 10,000 employees and their families are among the primary targeted patrons.

The art here has not only escaped the gallery, but also the street, and has come to this liminal space that is neither as vulnerable or impermanent as street art, nor as static or inaccessible as gallery art. As Ambrogi points out, the containers, mimicking many street artists themselves, are itinerant. They will be on their way, carting goods across the country, when the show is over.

Shreya Ila Anasuya is a Delhi-based freelance writer and activist

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