The Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi collaborated with two artists to tell stories of art, travel and their coming together in public spaces. By Team Viva

The Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi has turned the city walls into its canvas to tell stories of art, travel and their coming together in public spaces, while also promoting cross-cultural collaboration between India and Germany

Graphic Travelogues #Murals is a unique collaboration to make art more accessible and democratic, and highlights the cross-cultural collaboration between two young women artists who paint their first-ever mural. The Goethe-Institut partnered with St+art India to realise the vision of the project and to take art to the public spaces in Delhi and Chennai, while promoting a creative exchange of ideas on the theme of travel and its evolution during the pandemic.

Artists from across the globe were engaged to create Graphic Travelogues, a digital platform dedicated to comics, focusing on the subject of travel since 2019. Taking this journey to another dimension, Goethe-Institut and

St+art launched an open call to invite one German and one Indian artist to collaboratively work on two murals — one in Delhi’s Lodhi Art District and the other in Kannagi Art District, Chennai.

The selected artists, Greta Von Richthofen and Aashti Miller, were encouraged to work on thought-provoking ideas about the meaning of ‘travel’ from a broad lens. During the unprecedented time of the pandemic, when physical travel and any kind of free movement was halted, they found themselves tucked away with their thoughts, and were transported to an ocean of imagination. Thus, the artists explore the idea of ‘traveling in the mind’ through these murals— seen as a journey that anyone can make, regardless of culture, background, or spatial limitations.

The flying and running fish, and birds playfully depict different ways of traveling: over water, in the air, and on land. This journey seeks to emphasise the sense of discovery that travelling entails, relaying how crucial it is to cultivate inclusive and diverse perspectives for an enriching and meaningful experience of life. Therefore, from an expansive lens to a site-specific one, the artists include hyper-localised elements that become symbolic of this journey.

Depicting local flora and fauna, traditional and historical elements inspired by Mughal architecture and fantastical creatures, the work further explores travel to one’s past, through a shared nostalgia. Similarly, in Chennai, the artists make references to the city through a localised and engaging vocabulary.

The murals differ in colour and motifs, but connect to one another by showcasing the positive power and immense possibilities of imagination and creativity, which enters the mind in Chennai and flows out of the hands in Delhi. This conceptual connection thus ‘travels’ across two diverse cities.

As we all recover and return to the new normal, we might be fish out of the water, but Miller and Richthofen believe that their explorations have taught them to embrace this discomfort and translate it into a magical journey.

Photo: Pankaj Kumar