KHOJ PUBLIC ART RESIDENCY PROGRAM REPORT
By BAMBANG TOKO
Crowded, that was the first word popped up in my mind
when I arrived in New Delhi, India. I imagined before
that New Delhi was similar with Jakarta, but it turned
out to be bigger and more packed.
In the first days I traveled around the town to check
out the public spaces and public art practices in
Delhi. It startled me and made me wonder to see that
there were so many public space there that are not
well mentained and there were almost know public art
practices done by artists, most of them were usually
statues or monuments that were commission works, not
pure individual work by artist. I did not also see
street art practices such as murals, graffiti or even
spontaneous spary paint scrabbles. What I saw most of
the time on the walls in the flyover pillars of the
city were advertising posters, wether in good
condition or already worn out. On the other hand, I
was amazed by the fact that there were so mny
activities of art performances (wether done for
religius purposes or other reasons) conducted in
public spaces almost everyday.
It remaineded me of the public art scene in Jogjakarta
(my city) that is full of murals and graffiti
practices, which for me was alsopossible to be done in
Delhi. This is also because I was invited to jaoin a
series of special artist in residence program for
public art. I could begin to realize that idea in this
program.
After doing a one month survey on pblic spaces in
Delhi and also some strategic time planning to work
for only half a month, I then decided to use the city
public transportation as the medium of my work. I
chose Tempo because I want my work to be seen by a
broader range of public. The next issue was what kind
of images that I would show on the Tempo. I wanted the
images to be understood by everyone in New Delhi but
it also had a deliver my massage clearly, that which I
had to figure out.
As far as I know, India is very wellknown far its
Bollywood movie, so then I did a brief research on the
attachment of the society in New Delhi Bollywood
movies. It turned out that from primary school
students to the elder citizen were such avid fans of
the Bollywood stars and movies and they spontaneously
sang the songs right way when I mentioned one of the
film tittles.
So then, I decided to use the face of two very famous
Bollywood movie stars, Aishwarya Rai and Kareena
Kapoor as the images on the tempo, which I paired with
my own face, as if they added with texts that say “I
love you tomorrow” and “I love you sometimes”. The
public certainly recognize the faces of Aish and
Kareena but who ws the face beside them? They must
have been curious.
When I started to do this work with stencil graffiti
technique on 3 Tempos, I received enthutiastic
responses from the audiences (people who lives around
the area where I made my work). They asked to be
pictured in front ot the images of Aish and Kareena,
and there were some who even kissed the images.
This event created a lasting impression for me not
omly because the way they appreciated my work but also
afterwards they treated me so friendly for that. Some
people even treated me jae and whisky.
In making these work I was assisted a lot by Hemant,
Gambeer and all the staff at KHOJ. I even managed to
teach Aarun and…………. Some stencil graffiti technique.
Before I came back to Indonesia, I took some cance to
make some stencil graffiti works on the rolling doors
of the phone kiosk owned by Gambeer. I also made
stencil graffiti images of the faces of all KHOJ
staff.
I would like to give some input about these residency
program upon the job range of Hemant as the
coordinator. I think his work is overloaded, which
raised my sympathy for him it would be better if he
could have another person to help.
Sukriya