Kolkata’s Behala Art Fest aims to connect aesthetics with the ordinary

Behala Art Fest brings art to the streets, making it accessible to all, featuring artists from around the world.

This is a show that aims to drag art out of galleries onto the streets to make it accessible to people who would otherwise never imagine stepping into the hallowed halls where it is usually displayed. The Behala Art Fest — perhaps the only event in Kolkata named after a neighbourhood — begins on Friday (December 20, 2024), completing five years with this edition and more popular than ever.

“Artists are encouraged to engage in any artistic discipline, including installation, photography, performance, and graffiti, among others. This year, artists from several countries, including Japan, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, and Denmark, are participating,” Panchali Banerjee, director of Behala Art Fest Foundation, said.

Since the show is for the public, in the real sense of the word, displays are located in places such as buildings, garages, shops. streets, parking lots, and rickshaw stands. “The idea is to make art as much accessible to a vegetable vendor as to a vegetable buyer, as much accessible to a rickshaw puller as to a commuter. We wanted to free art from the confines of galleries, we wanted to rid it of the elitist tag, we wanted to bridge the gap between art and ordinary people,” Abhishek Bhattacharjee, one of the organisers, said.

The show will go on for three days, December 20-22, open to the public from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. As many as 25 artists are participating and round-the-clock security and CCTV cameras will protect their exhibits. This year’s show is being curated by Anuradha Pathak and Ayan Mukherjee.

“Apart from Durga Puja, this is the only art festival that happens in the public realm, bringing together visual artists, performance artists filmmakers, photographers and social art practitioners on the same platform. This year many artists interacted with the people of Behala and that excited the locals because they saw themselves as part of the fest and not just providers of space.  When people from the locality become part of the process and act as collaborators, the event automatically becomes inclusive and the excitement increases,” Ms. Pathak said.

The festival is usually held in February but this year had to be shifted from February to December because board exams were advanced due to the general elections and exam-related restrictions were in place. The inaugural edition was held shortly before the COVID-19 lockdown was imposed and luckily for the organisers, subsequent Februarys saw the relaxation of pandemic-related restrictions.