Malls in India are turning into latest home of contemporary art

If you are visiting Delhi's Select Citywalk mall this weekend, don't be surprised if you hear someone cough, snort or sigh inside the lift. No, it isn't someone playing a prank. It is a work of art, Baptist Coelho's On the Edge #2, and part of a public sound art exhibition called "Listen Up!" curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt and Tim Goossens. 

“Sound art” is an established genre in the West but remains largely unknown in India, though a few Indian artists have been working in the medium of late. Besides Coelho, you can hear one other Indian sound artist at Select Citywalk: Shreyas Karle, with an audio loop of voices insistently repeating “Listen to me”. The mall will also present works by acclaimed international sound artists — the Israeli Uri Aran, the American collective Japanther, and Jason Singh from the UK who will present an audio track of trilling birds. 

Betancourt says she chose the lifts to “showcase” the works because it is one space where people will have no option but to listen. There will, of course, be write-ups on the walls to tell people what it's all about. Upscale shoppers at Citywalk may or not pay attention, but they will rarely get to hear something like this in India. This is the reason Betancourt chose to locate the show inside a mall — to expose Indians to contemporary public art, such a big thing in the West with sculpture parks and installations on beaches, squares, metro stations. “India,” she says, “does not have a culture of public art.”  

Ironically malls —commercial spaces, sanitized from the dust and chaos of a typical Indian public space — are emerging as the platform for arts evangelists who want to expose Indians to the best of contemporary art. Listen Up! is supported by non-profit arts initiative 1After320, run by the gallery Exhibit320 “to increase the possibilities of what art can be and expand the educational initiatives…into the public realm”. Interestingly, Arjun Sharma, one of the mall’s co-partners, collects art. No wonder then that Select Citywalk has an active arts initiative and showed Subodh Gupta's cycle-rickshaw laden with brass pots and other works of art.    

But it is at the Phoenix Garden City Velachery in Chennai that the mission is carried to its apogee. Promoted by prominent art collector Vijay Choraria, through his non-profit Art©, the mall has art built into its DNA, with infrastructure to display contemporary art across mediums incorporated right at the drawing stage. "When we were building the mall we realised the space would be an important public space... That it was an opportunity to bring art into the public space and have people interact with it," says Choraria. 

The only form of art that the mall lacks is paintings, but that says Choraria, would clash with the shopwindows. And yes, the videos are in the elevator banks because those are the only place inside the mall where the lights can be dimmed.

Phoenix Garden City, which opened in January, has digital panels to display text art (with SMS-interactive capability), sound systems in the elevators, screen in elevators banks and a vaulted central atrium for very large sculptures such as Thukral & Tagra's Apocalyptron, a 4.25 metre-tall sculpture of Chitti (the robot from Rajani Kant's Enthiran) made of used bottles, which now occupies it. 

For Choraria it has meant going the extra mile. Phoenix Garden City is run like a “private museum”, he says, with Betancourt to curate the artworks; Eve Lemesle to provide the specialised arts management and production skills, extra security and insurance cover for the artworks. Like a museum, the art at the mall is also rotated every six months or so. But thanks to Choraria’s goodwill among and long-standing relationship with artists and galleries, who come forward to lend him art —Indian artists like Sunil Gawde as well as important international ones like Leslie Thornton, or (coming soon) William Kentridge — sourcing art is not a problem.