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Business News/ News / Business Of Life/  Dharavi’s biennale
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Dharavi’s biennale

The Alley Galli Biennale aims to blend art, health and science in one of Asia's largest informal settlements

Prajna Desai will curate a food festival with the women of Dharavi Premium
Prajna Desai will curate a food festival with the women of Dharavi

NEW DELHI :

Ishquiya Dharavi Style is not your usual play. The story—about a boy and a girl who fall in love, and their supportive parents and neighbours— deals with complex issues of relationships and sexuality against the backdrop of one of Asia’s largest informal settlements, Dharavi in Mumbai.

Written by Paromita Vohra and directed by Latesh Poojary, the play features Dharavi children aged 5-15. For Poojary, who started the workshop for the play in November, the challenge proved to be ensuring that the children didn’t perform the B-boying dance they had learnt at an earlier workshop.

Ishquiya Dharavi Style will be staged at the Alley Galli Biennale. The three-week art festival, starting Sunday, is organized by the Mumbai-based NGO SNEHA (Society for Nutrition, Education and Health Action); it was first held in 2013, on a smaller scale.

Some of the comic stips at a stall
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Some of the comic stips at a stall

So the effort is structured around workshops that bring local artists together with mentoring artists and health scientists to develop works that raise questions about food, nutrition, safety, mental health and occupational hazards. “The idea is to blend art and science to showcase the contribution of Dharavi’s residents to the city’s economic and cultural life," says Nayreen Daruwalla, programme director for prevention of violence against women and children at SNEHA. Daruwalla and David Osrin, a senior research fellow at the UK-based Wellcome Trust, a health foundation, are the two directors of the Biennale.

The Biennale will feature 15 artworks and have 10 events, including music performances and theatre, across venues in Dharavi that include Colour Box, Shama Building and Jeevon Hall. The events include a puppet theatre performance by Dharavi residents and Ishara Puppet Theatre on the subject of tuberculosis, and poet-performer Shane Solanki’s music workshop with the women of Dharavi. The celebrated play Vagina Monologues, directed by Kaizad Kotwal, will be staged.

An anthology of 76 black and white comics produced by Dharavi residents will be launched too. “The comics revolve around subjects such as road accidents, physical and mental violence, food and nutrition, and adolescent sexualities," says Chaitanya Modak, a Mumbai-based graphic designer who has curated and mentored the comics artbox. The youngest artist is 12, the oldest, 65. “Some of them didn’t even know what comics were," he says. Others, he adds, didn’t want their families to look at their effort, since the comics are based on instances from their lives.

There will be a showcase of around 300 photographs taken by Dharavi children, documenting the occupational hazards of industries in their area, like plastic recycling. While clicking these photographs, the children not only learnt how to compose a shot, but also simple things like the need for gloves while cleaning glass bottles, says Nitant Hirlekar, the mentor for this segment.

Healers Of Dharavi, an exhibition on health curated by historian Supriya Menon, will feature portraits of eight health practitioners and traditional healers living and practising in Dharavi, captured on canvas by local painters and artists.

A festival about health and nutrition must feature food. So you have the Dharavi Food Project, curated by art historian Prajna Desai. It is a compilation of recipes and dishes, including dhokli and bakheer, by eight women residents. Desai started working on this project in February last year: “The biggest challenge was getting women to excavate recipes, including listing ingredients, dividing method from ingredients, and presenting cooking as a sequence of actions."

But this is what the festival is all about: raising awareness about health issues and encouraging Dharavi’s residents to discover their hidden talent.

The Alley Galli Biennale will be held from 15 February-7 March, 10am-7pm.Click here for details.

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Published: 12 Feb 2015, 10:11 PM IST
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