By Madhusree Chatterjee, IANS,
New Delhi: Husna loves to colour her canvases blue and darken the lighted spaces in her nature-scapes with thick dabs of acrylic pigments. The 14-year-old lost her father and lives in a home for the destitute in the capital.
Art is known to have healing qualities and street children like Husna, Firoz, Pranav and Ajay – who have had a tough childhood, with some even having spent time in juvenile homes – will vouch for it.
Art, says Husna, is “like a salve”. She exhibited her art for the first time at the Visual Arts Gallery in the India Habitat Centre as part of ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’, an ongoing collaboration between 21 leading artists and the city’s street children.
“I had a tough childhood without my father. My mother had to work hard to bring us up. Four years ago, I was forced to move to a juvenile home for girls because my mother could not devote time to me. I began painting two and a half years ago and it has calmed my nerves,” Husna said.
The children say art acts as a psychological balm and helps them move from the fringes to the mainstream.
“Art is the best language of soft diplomacy. Sometimes it is the non-taught who drive the taught with symbiotic ideas shared by people who live in shelters and those who need shelters,” Alka Pande, curator of the special art project, told IANS.
“Art is one of the most effective tools of communication…reflecting the dynamic and healing energy of artists across social and geographical boundaries.”
Nineteen-year-old amateur photographer Firoz, an inmate of Salaam Balak Trust, found his calling in photography two years ago.
“It gave me peace. I work for fashion photographer Atul Kasbekar and want to follow in his footsteps,” Firoz told IANS.
His coloured photographic frames of the polluted Yamuna river have earlier been exhibited at the Hahnemuehle Museum in Germany as part of his mentor Delhi-based freelance photographer Enrico Fabian’s project “Yamuna – An Endangered Species” with whom he collaborated.
In Mumbai, artist Brinda Chaudsama Miller has worked with street children living near her studio.
“Mera Mohalla”, a mixed media installation of a chair and colourful hand-painted cushions by Miller, is a collaboration with three street children – Pranav, Suresh and Aniket.
“My only brief to the children was they should list all the things they had observed in their ‘mohalla’ (street),” said Miller, who was here for an event.
Delhi-based artist Viren Tanware often works with street children and says kids express their innermost desires through art.
“Most of the time, street children use art as self-expression of their longings. When I collaborated with 10-year-old Ajay, an inmate of a children’s home in Delhi for a canvas titled ‘My Dream’, I told him to paint his dreams. Ajay painted homes hanging upside down from the sky because he said flying was too expensive. He would rather have his homes fly to save cost,” Tanware said.
Seema Kohli, also an artist in the capital, echoed Tanware’s view.
“I found that homeless children like to paint quaint dwellings if told to draw their thoughts on paper,” Kohli said.
Toronto-based artist Anjum Siddiqui, who was part of the ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ project, told IANS: “The street children I worked with drew pizzas, homes, Alladin’s lamp and Lord Krishna to articulate their deep-seated wishes.”
Anubhav Nath, the brain behind the Tihar Jail Inmates’ Art Project, said “art was self-healing”.
“It can deal with several anguishes that sometimes have no treatment,” said Nath.
Said Arun Maira, an art aficionado and member of the Planning Commission: “We want to educate street children, but before educating them we must learn to listen to them. India cannot listen to itself without listening to its children…Art is a meaningful way to allow them the freedom to express and draw them into the mainstream,” Maira told IANS.
(Madhusree Chatterjee can be contacted at [email protected])