NEW YORK - The Guild Art Gallery, NY is delighted to present a unique initiative involving artists and public titled “I think therefore graffiti…”

This initiative which first took place in Mumbai, India includes about twenty artists who were invited by The Guild from across the country to participate in this project mostly working in the nights. They include Apnavi Thacker, Atul Dodiya, Baiju Parthan, Balaji Ponna, Bose Krishnamachari, Gigi Scaria, G. R. Iranna, Justin Ponmany, Kiran Subbaiah, K. P. Reji, Mithu Sen, Navjot Altaf, Prajakta Potnis, Rakhi Peswani, Riyas Komu, Sathyanand Mohan, Sumedh Rajendran, T. V. Santhosh, Vishal Dar, Ved Gupta and Vivek Vilasini.

During the tenure of the exhibition public participation will be invited for an ongoing graffiti on the wall of the gallery and same will be uploaded on our site every few days thus disseminating this participation worldwide.

Rakhi Peswani in her essay for the show explains:

Who designs, beautifies, creates our cities, our roads, gullies, pavements, parks, markets, and other public spaces? And who is entitled to use these spaces, maintain them, live in them? Who is responsible towards the safety of these spaces? Who controls them? ...In the larger matrix of these and many other unanswered questions, remains the public sphere, the street culture, the physical space of day to day living and commuting in large metropolitan cities. These spaces, unofficially, also house enumerable migrants who compromisingly arrive to the cities everyday...holding those dreams that they are unable to realize within the contexts they leave behind.

The project, titled: “I think therefore graffiti…” initiated by the Guild Art Gallery, in India invited artists from across the country to perhaps, locate those thoughts that visit the spirit of Graffiti. The domains of exclusion, of a constructed ‘mainstream’, the domain of anti aesthetic, the domain of fast, transient, street culture, of politics of private property, of art and its objectification, of homelessness, art and site specificity, the spoken and the visual, the spontaneous expression, the strengths of the vulnerable, reactionary visual activism on the urban streets, mobility of the ‘common man’, deprivation, isolation, commercialisation are some of the tropes that seemed to be opened through this project.