Bringing her fearless murals to Colombo
Shilo Shiv Suleman: Creating space for public participative art
“I paint huge murals on the street that are often 60 feet high and 60 feet wide while I’m hanging off a six-storey building in the freezing cold with a huge brush in my hand,” Shilo Shiv Suleman describes a typical day as she takes to the streets to create bold and colourful murals centred on marginalised communities around the world.
Now the Bengaluru-based artist has set her sights on Colombo.
Inspired by her mother who is also an artist, Shilo began to paint at the age of 13 and went on to illustrate books for children at 18 years old. It was when she combined her interest in art and technology that she launched an interactive story telling app for children titled ‘Khoya’ for the iPad when she was 21. It drew attention from TedGlobal which extended an invitation for her to deliver a talk titled “Using Tech to Enable Dreaming”. The video received over a million views on YouTube in 2012 following which she was named one of the three pioneering Indian women at TedGlobal.
The same year Shilo founded The Fearless Collective in response to the ‘Nirbhaya’ gang rape in New Delhi. Recalling the protests that followed the tragedy Shilo says, “There was an amazing amount of rage and power and grief and the kind of stories that we as women were telling each other on the streets of the protests were so different from the stories we heard in mainstream media.” The Fearless Collective was initiated shortly after as a viral online campaign countering reports by mainstream media which, according to Shilo, were only further perpetuating fear.
What began as a way to encourage more women to tell their stories and heal through these shared experiences has evolved into a movement made up of hundreds of artists who aim to ‘create space to move from fear to love using participative public art’.
To date, The Fearless Collective has co-created 38 murals with communities in over 10 countries including in India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Brazil and Tunisia. Their work has addressed issues ranging from sexual violence, gender identity and women’s rights and highlighted indigenous peoples, refugees and members of the transgender community among others.
During their visit to Colombo the Collective will work with artists from Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka, for a short intensive artist residency in order to create two public murals. These murals will be painted in partnership with local community partners – ‘We Are From Here Project’ which works with members of the Slave Island community and ‘The Sisterhood Initiative’ which works to create spaces for Muslim women. The murals will concentrate on themes of self-representation, interfaith and cross-border solidarity, and what it looks like to build safe, inclusive, feminist spaces.
The Fearless Collective connects with members of the community by conducting workshops that involve an immersive story telling session drawing from art therapy that focuses on the trauma and transcendence of communities living in the margins. A key part of their workshops, says Shilo is self-representation by the community members. In this workshop communities are asked to discuss how they would like to be depicted before they ultimately get to represent themselves and paint their own images on the streets thereby enabling them to tell their own stories.
“We create images that are representations of a future that is yet to be – it’s almost as if we’re creating portals to a safe and sacred future we want to inhabit rather than waiting for permission or depicting images of pain over and over again,” says Shilo.
While the Collective’s work is usually received positively with passersby becoming intrigued and eager to pick up a paint brush and join in, Shilo tells us that that their safety has been a concern more than a few times. She lists harrowing accounts of gunfire breaking out at mural sites along with having to cautiously navigate around police and the military as some of the more dire situations they have faced in certain locations.
The Collective aims for what they call their ‘rule of three’; first to shift people internally by making them consider their own personal history or how they view themselves; second, create a social dialogue pertaining to the issues surrounding these communities through their murals; and finally, to have a universal impact by way of a shift in societies, policies and governance. “When people begin to see images like this it starts to become normalised, we see that public opinion shifts and very soon after systems begin to shift as well.”
Their Colombo project will be held from March 28 to April 5. All are welcome to join and paint alongside the artists.
Visit their website www.fearlesscollective.org and Instagram page @fearlesscollective to stay updated when locations of the mural sites are announced.
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