Step into the Asian Paints Art House at the Mumbai Urban Art Festival

To celebrate this landmark, Asian Paints is hosting the Mumbai Urban Art Festival along with the St+art India Foundation and Mumbai Port Authority. The festival gives the heritage landmark of Sassoon Docks in Colaba, Mumbai an aesthetic overhaul highlighting the city’s shared landscape with the sea, its diverse communities, and vivid local stories.

Over the next three months, the Mumbai Urban Art Festival will showcase the works of globally and locally renowned artists who will give Mumbai’s famed as well as lesser-known landmarks an aesthetic and meaningful overhaul. Locals and visitors can look forward to witnessing a series of murals, experiential exhibitions, immersive installations, and community programs like walks, mixers, and talks. The pièce de résistance of the event, however, is the one-of-a-kind project called the ‘Asian Paints Art House’.

THE ASIAN PAINTS ART HOUSE

As Sassoon Docks opens into the Arabian Sea, standing as an inlet for a range of culture, art and folk through the centuries, the ‘Asian Paints Art House’ was designed to represent a node in the ocean. It contains three important installations: one has been designed by Ayaz Basrai from The Busride Studio using waste, debris, up-cycled fabrics, and odd bits and pieces found around the dock as a maelstrom that pulls together currents into the Art House by creating an energy vortex. On the first floor of the Art House, Ayaz also interprets the idea of what a ‘home’ can be, taking inspiration from creative living and modular design, while also incorporating the Colour of The Year—Silver Escapade—in several unique ways. 

BUNGALOW BY STEVE MESSAM

The third installation within the Art House is by internationally-acclaimed environmental artist Steve Messam, who has created ‘Bungalow’—an inflatable textile installation in the Asian Paints Colour of the Year 2023 ‘Silver Escapade’. A large silver form fills the first-floor veranda of the heritage bungalow representing the bustling city of Mumbai, which brims with ambition. Billowing forms in different sizes and angles showcase the coexistence of people who have migrated from different parts of the country in search of opportunities. It reflects light and transforms the colonial style bungalow it is housed in by lifting one’s focus up and out. It is in the typical style of Steve’s artworks, which forces viewers to quite literally stop and stare, and therefore perceiving a familiar environment in a new way.

THE MEANING BEHIND THE ASIAN PAINTS COLOUR OF THE YEAR 2023

Steve has worked with the Asian Paints Colour of the year 2023 ‘Silver Escapade’ for his textile installation. Silver Escapade is an illusory shade that echoes the mind of a traveller—one who’s moving through virtual and physical worlds. It heralds a coexistence between magical stories from our childhood, a brighter optimistic present, and a future that will consciously be created by us. While the past few years forced us into a stillness, it is important to notice how we’ve gotten through it by unknowingly looking at silver linings around us. Silver Escapade calls to focus on that inherent hopefulness which human beings rely on to keep going.