Remembering Hanif Kureshi, the artist who breathed life into Mumbai’s streets

Almost a decade ago, I stood in front of a building in Lodhi Colony—my first time in Delhi—looking up at the shadows the sun had cast. Words had emerged from the typographic signage welded into the facade: ‘age’, ‘year’, ‘month’, ‘day’, ‘date’ on one line; ‘time’, ‘past’, ‘present’, ‘future’ on the next; ‘people’, ‘memory’, ‘perception’, ‘definition’ elsewhere. Our docent made us halt, announcing that we would be spending some time here and that we were to carefully observe the wall. As I looked on, the shadows shifted and the text got increasingly cursive until it became illegible. “The words in this art piece,” our guide explained, “symbolise the aspects of our lives that are constantly in flux. Beauty, fame, fortune, identity—all these things are forever changing until we die.” He described it as “performance art without the artist in attendance”. That was the first time I had come face-to-face with the anonymous DAKU’s work and also my first time seeing street art displayed on this scale in India.

Many years would pass until I figured that the same man was behind both these occurrences. But once you learned of Hanif Kureshi, he was everywhere you looked: a metro station in Bangalore, a building in Mahim, the bustling Churchgate train station, Daku’s trademark typographic marvels on a street in Panjim. An exemplary figure in Indian street art and co-founder of St+art India, India’s biggest street art festival, Kureshi played an instrumental role in transforming India’s public spaces by making art accessible to all by moving it out of galleries and into the open. Under his loving tutelage, India’s dusty streets came alive with colour and spirit through the 330 murals painted across eight cities in collaboration with more than 300 artists.

When Kureshi passed away on Sunday at the age of 41 after a battle with cancer, the art community mourned the loss of a visionary who had the foresight to realise that the future of art is democratic and will be carried forward by those who leave the confines of their ivory towers. For those who knew him well, Kureshi’s legacy will live on as the disruptor who emblazoned the pristine walls of those very ivory towers with spectacular murals.

Below, nine artists, who shared varying degrees of closeness with the late artist, honour his memory:

Rohan Sinha