Connecting people through art 

We are excited to announce a collaboration with Kala Hubba, the visual arts programme of BLR Hubba. The programme engages with Bengaluru’s public spaces, beginning with Freedom Park—once the city’s jail and now reimagined as a site for public protest, leisure, play, and much more. Today, it brings people together across gender, class, language, and religion.
The objective of the programme is to connect with communities in spaces they feel a sense of ownership over, through artworks that respond to the architecture of these sites and the needs of the people who inhabit them.
Curated by Kamini Sawhney, the festival features, among others, a selection of video works produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation, by artists Adrián Balseca, Erkan Özgen, Jungju An, Moojin Brothers, Musquiqui Chihying, Noor Abed, Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian, Shahana Rajani, Shuruq Harb, Sojung Jun, Thao Nguyen Phan, and Timoteus Anggawan Kusno.


About Kala Hubba:
What do we as citizens yearn for? Is it liberation? What do we want to be free from? Noise? Social constructs? Surveillance? And what do we  seek through our freedom—a memory, a right, a struggle, or a promise?

Prisons, more than almost any other architecture in the city, hold a myriad of stories within their walls. They are brutal yet intimate spaces where resistance is often crafted patiently. Freedom Park, the flagship venue of the Hubba, was the site where prisoners of the first war of Independence were executed after it was constructed in 1866 by the British. Many freedom fighters who were part of India's struggle for Independence have paced these barracks, including prisoners held later during the Emergency. What did liberation mean to those who fought for it from inside these walls?

Even the prison's hospital wings whisper tales of mingled hope and anguish as pregnant women prisoners housed here brought new life into this world. What were their hopes for freedom, birthing new life while locked away from it?

Kala Hubba explores the varied aspects of liberty not only within the personal and political space but also the challenges that freedom brings when advocating for inclusion of gender, body, labour, caste and community. Can art provide spaces of solidarity, care and mental well-being? Can it encourage discussion, debate and urge us out of our inertia?

These are questions that are echoed in the several venues that Kala Hubba activates across the city, initiating conversations, building community, providing a platform for those who struggle to be heard. The artists who are part of this public arts project approach freedom from many perspectives: freedom from marginalisation, from gender discrimination, freedom of speech, freedom of the body and of the mind. Their works span personal, political, and poetic interpretations, asking us to examine our own notions of freedom and whether they accommodate the rights of others.

They remind us that freedom is part of an ongoing negotiation, something that must be protected, expanded, and reimagined. And that is the challenge with freedom: it often raises difficult questions about who defines it, who grants it, and who benefits from it.