Today, pasted flyers reading things like ‘PG for Boys’ or ‘Work from home opportunities’ constantly infiltrate our visual landscape. Courtesy the ready availability of accessible A4 sheets, our cities have become cluttered with small, home-printed advertisements.
As part of St+art Goa 2017 and collaboration with Serendipity Arts Festival, select visual artists including Rutva Trivedi, Shazneen Todiwala, Hanif Kureshi, and Do & Khatra worked on a project titled the A4 Art Project, interpreting the idea of Goa and creating works which were printed in bulk and pasted across the city in A4-sized posters. The experiment started as a satirical protest against ‘A4 vandalism’ - something which has become an unfortunate part of our urban landscape.
Carried out across several streets in Panjim, the project sought to explore the nature of art in public spaces, which at times may be perceived as an appropriation, providing that the viewer has not decided to see it, unlike when one goes to an exhibition.
Can therefore this creative act be seen as 'vandalism'?
Opting for a subtle mocking take on public announcements that inundate our lines of sight, the intervention thus questioned the ubiquity of visual noise by adding to it while disrupting it in its artistic nature.
