Aravani Art Project

The Aravani Art Project is a women and transwomen art collective based in Bangalore, Karnataka. The project aims to create safe spaces for alternate voices through art. It has provided the third gender, outsiders to many communities, with an open platform to express their views about transgender rights and equality to a larger audience. Their projects include street art and art festivals in different public spaces in order to sensitize people and encourage exchange, discussion, openness, and debate surrounding gender identities. The project, in their own words, has given the transgenders the confidence to step out and interact with a community beyond their own.

The Story of Bangalore

The Story of Bangalore captures the myriad communities that live and breathe in this vibrant, urban landscape. From migrant workers who have built the glass-facade buildings in the city’s technology parks to the IT workforce that populate them – Bengaluru’s “ techies” who have arrived here from different parts of the country and the world. The city’s traffic cops are instantly recognizable with their distinctive cowboy hats standing companionably alongside a person from the trans community. The entire artwork visually weaves together the stories of hundreds of people who have made Bangalore their home and reflects MAP’s vision of what the museum hopes to be – a space for a collection which unlocks stories that the community wants to hear and share and inspire each other with.

About MAP

The Museum of Art & Photography’s (MAP) mission is to take art and culture to the heart of the community making it accessible to diverse audiences. It will achieve this by exhibiting, interpreting, and preserving India’s rich artistic heritage, motivated by the belief that museums should play a positive role in society. MAP will be a space for ideas and conversations that are initiated through its collection enabling engagement with audiences in multiple ways.

MAP has invited the Aravani Art Project for a commission to paint the shuttering of its upcoming museum in the heart of the city that reflects the Story of Bangalore. MAP envisions this commission as an important narrative of our times and is based on its core values of inclusion and collaboration