"Extension Khirkee" Street Art Festival
By Jyoti Dhar
“Extension Khirkee” is the first properly organized street art festival to take place in Delhi, in the city's Khirki Village area. It was launched on March 24 at the not-for-profit Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), where a public talk was given by the partipating artists and guide maps were handed out. The project was organized by artist Aastha Chauhan, and funded by the participants themselves and through the goodwill of a private donor. Chauhan, who previously worked with Khirki-based art space Khoj for six years, took part in a residency in Italy with local street artists before coordinating this festival. Knowing the Khirki area and local community well, she was able to pair up certain artist-friends (architects, graphic designers and advertising creatives by day, muralists or graffiti artists by night) with particular walls and locations in the area. The murals in the festival, all created within a three-week period from March 10–31, are available to view indefinitely.
The political structures and official planning regulations of the village are not as well-defined as in Delhi's “gated communities,” which means they have become sites for experimental creative projects. The area is home to alternative spaces such as Khoj and the hip-hop dance studio Tiny Drops. As a social, economic and cultural mix—of older village families, recent migrants to the capital, middle-class students and low-income laborers—also situated adjacent to a major shopping mall, Khirki is a crossroads of sorts between areas representative of old and new India.
