Street Art India + Asi an Paints initiative

‘Art for All’ festival

Gneev Nagi

Who could have imagined turning a fish market into a street art project?

St+art India in association with Asian Paints managed to beautifully convert the Sassoon Docks in south Mumbai into a space that heightened our olfactory organs (very much so) through their ‘Art for All’ Art festival.


A ‘sense’- sational experience, truly! The ‘Art for All’ festival was an initiative to celebrate the heritage of the 142-yearold dock. It was the first commercial wet dock in western India that helped establish the cotton trade. It played a prime role in encouraging the Bombay Presidency to promote the construction of the large Prince’s Dock during the dawn of the industrial revolution in the city.

Thus, the festival marked the celebration of an intrinsic part of the city- one which remained a forgotten space, reduced to the city’s source of it’s food-supply chain. Bridging the solidarity of the docks with the the curious minds of the viewers.

The history of the docks came alive as one walked through the lanes. The walls which were once unnoticed now looked back at you with black and white posters of women from the Koli community. The posters represented the work of globally renowned artist JR through his project ‘Inside-Out’- a global photography experiment, which celebrates the life, identity and amplifies untold stories of the original inhabitants of a given space-The Koli women being the case here, whose distinct identity was otherwise somehow lost in the city’s hustle bustle.

As you walk by, you’ll realize how the walls start making conversation with you through the brilliant grafiti done by a conglomeration of 30 artists. The muck is turned into beauty. That wall that went unnoticed for years, the broken brick that was never picked up, the pile of heap next to the banyan tree – they all became a canvas for an eclectic yet mind blowing – art show.