Delhi style.
[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]
Walk through Delhi streets to encounter the art installations set up by the capital’s electricity department.
The power cables emerging out of electric poles entangle into each other and make multitudes of dream forms that cannot be distinguished by clear outlines.
Do not expect decorum. A sense of restrain was never an element of Delhi style. Spurred by their clumsy free-floating characteristics, the cables liberate themselves from any sign of human interference and follow a non-linear progress of natural expansion as if this city was a wild-life sanctuary.
Every exhibit has its own severe exquisiteness and each expresses a hostile approach to the idea of an ordered way of living.
In some localities, the installations are so innovatively mounted and left to spread out in such complicated fantastical patterns that the viewer is confronted with an anarchy that threatens to strip off his (presumably) cultivated sensibilities and expose his savage rawness.
In the end, he returns home with the mind’s eye blinded by these long dangling shapes of copper, aluminum and plastic.
Note: According to a June 2012 report in Hindustan Times, 20 people have died and 48 injured after getting electrocuted in the past four years due to these high-tension wires criss-crossing the city.
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You call it art? I call it blight.
I really don’t think such unruly masses of wires should be celebrated or dignified as ‘art’, unless one is trying to be sarcastic. Their profound,almost criminal hideousness is matched only by the danger bits of loose and dangling wires pose to the safety of the people living in their vicinity.
I didn’t like even one picture out of the whole lot. This is the first time I didnt like something you put up
How about the photos of spit on the street? You liked one or more of those?
Thank you for this collection and for coming up with the term “wire art” – i’d never heard it before. Now that I don’t live in Delhi – i can perhaps even see the arrangement of the wires as “art” in the traditional way that your readers who are disappointed in this selection most likely define “art.” At the same time, who says “art” is there just for beauty…though in Delhi one misses beauty even more sorely. These wire installations are our lives, our society – they expose the ways in which we are entangled, our weaknesses, our corruption, our depandancies, our ingenuity, and our attempts at leading a livable life.
Like a forest in which the vegetation grows in a most bizarre and random manner, same way these wires tend to grow in the same mode.
We don’t expect beauty but amazed at the incredulous of it. Similarly, these wires just give a sense of “shock” to you at their random “disorder”.
These amazing tangles of wires are something we have always been amazed at and remarked on when visiting Old Delhi, and oddly enough, something we miss when seeing it again.