Art in the public realm

I love Delhi," says the sticker on the autorickshaw and you give it a nonchalant glance.

Then you see another autorickshaw with another sticker in the city with some poetry on a photographic background (could be the city's electric wires) with a question: "Delhi loves me?" (with the word love replaced by the kitschy lover's heart). It holds your attention.

Does the poetry on the humble rickshaw reveal something of the driver's migrant status in the city, you wonder.

On another site in Delhi's crowded Nehru Place, there are 32 life-size cutouts of a German, Helmunt Dick, in various positions and somewhere between them is the real Dick.

Passersby stop to stare at this bizarre installation, realising the presence of flesh and blood among the cutouts. Their reactions range from being stupefied to disgust to enjoyment to something more "" on the lines of regeneration.

It's this reaction that public art "" art in the general public's realm and based on it "" seeks. "Half the battle is won for public art when it generates any kind of reaction," says Pooja Sood, founder of the Khoj Studio, an alternative forum for experimentation and international exchange outside of institutional frameworks for the visual arts in India.

In Delhi's urban village, Khirki, a dusty lane leads us to the Khoj Studios. The afternoon sun lights the central courtyard and over lunch the artists discuss their public arts projects.

"It's difficult to explain what would constitute public art," says Navjot Altaf, a Mumbai-based artist, but she says her public art project with the autorickshaw stickers "allows creating grounds for the artist and people from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds to meet, communicate and collaborate".

The public arts spectrum may range from the tangible "" like Indonesian artist Bambang "Toko" Witjaksono's borrowed delivery tempos that ply on city roads, painted in a caricature form of him engaged in a dialogue with Aishwarya Rai.

Or it could be a play staged in a subway by artist Jasmeen Patheja on sexual harassment with provocative posters where audiences are given a letter that questions their experiences.

Would Patheja's play and its reactions, part of her Blank Noise Project on eve-teasing, be called art or activism?

There are no definite answers to this new form of experimental art in a nascent stage in India but, says Sood, "It constantly questions and allows the questioning to happen." The aesthetics for this might be planned in advance but "sometimes it develops as the show progresses", says Patheja.

In parts of south Delhi, television viewers might come across an advertising strip on the local cable channel designed by Pakistan-based artist Ali Talpur for a "missing" person. Talpur's project explores visual interplay and the impact of printed matter on our psyche.

"Though there is less support for experimental public art," says Dick, "one can call it a movement as art is dealing with different spaces and becoming interactive".

As Delhi streets witnessed art used to provoke reactions last week, the positive response was encouraging to the five public art artists who see it as a big step towards recognition of the experimental form.

Sood was surprised when a kid from Khirki asked her, "Auntie, the next time you have public art, tell me about it." Seems public art provoked the right audience. "Not bad," says Sood.