Art on the Go

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Can transforming metro stations into pop-up art galleries and performance spaces coax commuters to interact with each other?

Cubbon Park Metro Station
Over 3 lakh people pass through Bangalore metro stations every day, usually in a rush to get somewhere. But they often have reason to pause and take in the art installations, poetry and prose recitals, dance performances, videos, paintings and murals that now punctuate their journey. Metro stations have become the perfect canvas to take art to the urban commuter.

Inspired by similar initiatives from across the world, from Toronto to Singapore, artists, poets and students at Shrishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology aim to bring this idea home and create a continuous communication with Bangalore via myriad artistic interventions in metro stations around Bangalore.

The artists create motion-driven art work which they then display at Cubbon Park Metro Station and then record the reactions of the commuters that move through the station. The ultimate objective was to see how the people interacted with the installations and whether they showed an inclination to do so.

Saksham Verma, a contemporary street artist used concentric shells of blue and pink at the Cubbon Park metro station to show art in motion. Saksham's aim was to create a flow of motion through anamorphosis, a distorted projection or perspective. This would require the viewer to use special devices or occupy a certain fixed point to reconstitute the image.

The second such intervention was by Tanya Singh who wanted to bring Cubbon Park itself inside the steel and concrete metro station located at the edge of the Park. The mural at Entrance C of the station was her way to bring a sense of connection with the park outside.

 Commuters have their own stories that they live on a daily basis. This was the inspiration for Antra Khurana who created The Lost & Found, a series of 14 screen-printed posters on M.G. road and Cubbon Park Metro Station.

Cubbon Park Metro Station

“Such interventions were created to make people stop and interact. We see people of all ages stopping to look at the paintings and engage especially in the immersive installations,” said Natasha Sharma, an artist at Shrishti.

The Participatory Art was an engaging, “crowd-bending” work which was done in three stages at the Cubbon Park Metro station. With small rectangular fabric pieces, a small figure of a boy tied to two poles was created; the intervention was aimed at highlighting how fabrics moved when a metro rushes into a station.

People were then seen stopping and crowding around the art work and clicking selfies. The purpose was achieved. The second installation was more of a live set-up with commuters being asked to finger paint a piece of fabric on a running stitch and make flowers. Sensor installations then used the flowers to interact with the commuters.

Art in Transit was launched in Bangalore in 2015 with the Fabrice Grolaire’sgraffiti on the walls of the abandoned metro site at Peenya. Basing his inspiration on the scrapyard,now an abandoned place from where people had migrated, Fabrice created graffiti and made whimsical creatures using elements from the scrapyard. The beginning of the art in transit movement saw interventions moving along the metro line from Peenya in 2015 to Cubbon Park in 2017.


However, the objective and result remained the same, making artwork that catches the eye of commuters and brings them closer. The next intervention is planned for December, which will be an amalgamation of the preceding art installations.

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