Encountering Public Art in Indian Cities: The Politics of Meaning

1. Introduction: Problematising Meaning in Public Art

A public artwork as an object may appear obvious: a statue, memorial, installation, pavilion, or temporary structure. Ideas of authorship, formal qualities, iconography, commemorative intention, or political symbolism can be communicated to a public as though the significations were contained primarily within the object. The inadequacy of such autonomous readings has long been recognised in site-specific and critical public-art scholarship, which has located meaning within relations among artwork, site, institution, audience, and public sphere (Kwon, 2002; Deutsche, 1996; Mitchell, 1992; Miles, 1997). Even within relational readings, the surrounding urban semiotic and spatial system can still be undervalued as a mere background.

The premise of this paper is that the space around an artwork shapes how it becomes visible and accessible, what stands beside it, and, more significantly, what other images, activities, memories, and claims accompany its experience. In the Indian situations examined here, religious practices, informality, commercial imagery, heritage claims, infrastructure, and everyday urban life occupy the same visual arena. The issue is not what a public artwork represents, but what happens when the “site” itself is experienced as an uneven field of visibility, access, institutional power and lived experience.

1.1. Public Art as a Relational Urban Encounter.

Once inserted into public life, the artwork interacts with other systems of meaning. Collective memory may contradict an official historical narrative; informal use may disrupt a carefully composed visual order; ritual may appropriate a secular setting; commerce may reframe monumentality as consumption. Political change may alter the significance of symbols whose physical form remains unchanged. Even mundane streetscape elements—a pedestal, barricade, queue, temporary enclosure, or commercial frontage—participate in organising the conditions under which an artwork acquires public presence.

Lefebvre’s account of socially produced space famously unsettles the idea of space as an empty container for objects (Lefebvre, 1991). Space is produced through institutional conceptions, material arrangements, social practices, and lived experience. An artwork itself becomes part of that production. Location can confer centrality or marginality; scale can produce monumentality; circulation can choreograph experience; security can regulate proximity; infrastructure can attach narratives of progress or development.

Commissioning intention nevertheless remains important. State agencies, development authorities, cultural institutions, corporations, designers, and sponsors possess technocratic capacities to commission, locate, regulate, promote, conserve, or remove public art. They cannot, however, determine what it will eventually mean in public life.

Public art is conceptualised here as a relational urban encounter which is read through the interaction of object, spatial setting, official framing, and lived public practices. This relationality is neither assumed to be harmonious nor democratic.

1.2. Argument and Scope

Existing scholarship has already demonstrated that public art is lived relationally and experienced through differentiated and situated publics (Zebracki, van der Vaart and van Aalst, 2010; Zebracki and Palmer, 2018). The present paper shifts attention from the plurality of encounter to the political and spatial production of the conditions of encounter. Here, co-production refers to the relational formation of meaning across institutional framing, spatial arrangement, co-present signs and practices, and lived encounter; it does not imply equal authorship. The paper argues that public art enters an arena in which representational claims are staged, contested, and renegotiated.

Through four Indian cases—Kartavya Path, the Statue of Unity, the Kempegowda statue, and Durga Puja pandals—it examines how formal narratives are spatially organised yet remain exposed to memory, ritual, informality, and everyday use. The cases are not representative samples of Indian public art but deliberate contrasts. The argument is that public art is interpreted within a visual-spatial field, and the capacity to construct that field is itself unevenly distributed; urban design is one mechanism through which that unequal capacity becomes spatially operative.

2. Conceptual and Analytical Framework

The argument that an artwork cannot be separated from its site is hardly new. The analytical problem here is specific: how far does the site of public art extend, when that site is an uneven urban terrain rather than a bounded physical location? The framework moves from site, to publicness, to the organisation of visibility and encounter, before considering what situated Indian cases can contribute back to these theoretical categories, in the context of the Global South.

2.1. From Site-Specificity to Contested Publicness

The shift from autonomous object to site-specific art established that location is constitutive of symbolic and representational value rather than incidental to it (Kwon, 2002). “Site” itself progressively expands beyond physical location to include institutional, social, and discursive relations. Lefebvre situates these relations within the social production of space, while Massey further emphasises space as constituted through multiple trajectories, relations, and temporalities rather than as a stable container (Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 2005). For public art, the paper claims that the problem extends beyond relational space to the contested production of publicness. Deutsche argues that public space cannot be assumed to be a consensual arena awaiting cultural intervention; it is constituted through competing claims over visibility, legitimacy, use, and belonging (Deutsche, 1996). An artwork may therefore be publicly visible without being equally accessible, collectively experienced without being collectively authored, or symbolically inclusive while remaining spatially exclusionary.

The paper attempts an urban relational reading: what it is placed beside, how it is approached, which bodies can access it, what activities coexist with it, and which histories are made proximate or distant. This emphasis also requires differentiation from an established literature on public-art encounter. Zebracki, van der Vaart and van Aalst (2010) have argued for attention to the situated perspectives through which public-art claims are made, while Zebracki and Palmer (2018) conceptualise public art as lived through intersecting political, social, cultural and embodied encounters.

2.2. Signs, Visibility, and the Visual-Spatial Field

Urban semiotics provides one starting point for understanding this expanded configuration. The city is a signifying environment in which architecture, monuments, streets, commercial imagery, and spatial organisation acquire meaning relationally rather than in isolation (Gottdiener and Lagopoulos, 1986). Signs do not occupy equivalent positions: some are monumentalised, others peripheral; some are permanent, others temporary; some acquire institutional legitimacy while others may be regulated or removed. The question is therefore how particular signs acquire the power to organise attention.

Critical visual methodology helps shift the analysis to the conditions of encounter. Rose distinguishes among the production of an image, its visual organisation, and its audiencing (Rose, 2016). Public art complicates this sequence because audiencing is spatial. Viewers approach along particular routes, face thresholds and obstructions, move through designed sequences, occupy particular distances, and read the artwork alongside other objects, signs, bodies, and activities. The paper describes this expanded arena as the visual-spatial field. Analytically, it can be understood through five interrelated dimensions. The first is the institutional proposition or narratives for which an artwork is commissioned, promoted or authorised. The second is spatial inscription or the material means including siting, scale, access, thresholds and visibility. The third is the co-present semiotic field formed by the other objects, histories, commercial signs, rituals, bodies and activities that occupy the same perceptual environment. The fourth is the ways in which the expanded site is approached, photographed, ritualised, consumed, ignored or otherwise lived. The fifth is differential capacity: the unequal capacity of different actors to commission, regulate, or remove the material frame, as distinct from their capacities to appropriate, or contest it.

The visual-spatial field is more than an expanded synonym for “context.” It refers to the spatially organised and politically unequal relational arrangement through which public-art meaning becomes perceptible, and contestable. Its boundaries are analytical rather than fixed: they extend as far as spatial relations demonstrably participate in organising the artwork's public encounter. The cases that follow are read through these dimensions while allowing the relations that matter to vary from case to case.

Critical theories of spectacle and aesthetic governmentality are used more selectively, where visual ordering acquires particular political force. Debord becomes useful where political representation is organised through spectacle, circulation, consumption, and experience (Debord, 1967/1994). Ghertner's “rule by aesthetics” is more specifically relevant where judgements about how the city should look begin to regulate legitimacy, belonging, or spatial order (Ghertner, 2015).

2.3. Thinking from Situated Urban Encounters

The designation “Global South” presents its own analytical risk. Informality, congestion, ritual intensity, or infrastructural incompletion cannot be assembled into a singular condition. Roy argues for new geographies of urban theory in which metropolitan modernities of the Global South become legitimate sites of theory making rather than simply objects of theory developed elsewhere (Roy, 2009). Robinson’s call to treat cities as ‘ordinary’ challenges the tendency for cities of the Global South to appear primarily as developmental cases, anomalies, or empirical variations (Robinson, 2006).

The Indian cases are approached as situations capable of testing categories such as publicness, informality, aesthetic order, spectacle, and site-specificity. The four cases are not compared through formal equivalence. Their value lies in the friction generated by placing a re-scripted ceremonial landscape, a monument embedded in a tourism-development territory, regional memory staged within an international airport, and an ephemeral ritual environment within the same analytical frame. Robinson’s comparative urbanism provides a means through which concepts can travel, be revised, and generate insight across differently situated urban processes rather than a search for universal outcomes (Robinson, 2016).

This epistemological position also shapes the evidence used. Site observations, photographs, maps and spatial layouts, official narratives and promotional imagery, and relevant secondary accounts are interpreted in relation to one another rather than as separate categories of evidence. Mundane observations—a barricade cutting a sightline, an airport terminal framing a historical figure, sponsorship occupying a ritual threshold, or a tourist route determining the first view of a monument—matter because they can disclose relations excluded by an object-centred reading. The cases are allowed to press back against the framework. Site-specificity, socially produced space, urban semiotics, spectacle, and aesthetic governmentality provide ways of seeing.

3. Four Public-Art Situations in Contemporary India

The four cases are read through the common analytical sequence developed above, They progressively complicate where authorship and institutional framing can be located. The purpose is to examine how the visual-spatial field operates under different conditions of publicness and authority concentration.

3.1. Kartavya Path: Curating the National Landscape

Kartavya Path offers an unusually explicit instance of the state attempting to alter political association through the reorganisation and renaming of an already symbolically saturated landscape. The official account presents its 2022 transformation from Rajpath to Kartavya Path as a movement from an “icon of power” towards public ownership and empowerment, accompanied by the installation of Subhas Chandra Bose beneath the canopy near India Gate. At the same time, the Central Vista redevelopment documents emphasise restoration of the avenue's original symmetry, axial order, focal points, nodes, and carefully choreographed processional character. The first semiotic tension is embedded in the project itself: a postcolonial political rewriting is undertaken through spatial technologies of monumentality inherited from the imperial capital.

This is not the first postcolonial attempt to reinscribe the Central Vista. Kelly D. Alley’s study of proposals to locate Gandhi within the precinct showed that post-Independence debates over statuary were already contests over how the colonial landscape could be appropriated to represent the postcolonial nation (Alley, 1997). More generally, W. J. T. Mitchell’s formulation of landscape as a medium of cultural and political power is useful precisely because it moves analysis beyond what individual monuments signify towards what entire arrangements of space make visible and authoritative (Mitchell, 1994/2002). Kartavya Path can be read less as a collection of discrete symbols—India Gate, the Bose statue, Rashtrapati Bhavan, the ceremonial avenue—than as a curated national landscape in which adjacency, axiality, distance, scale, and sequence construct symbolic significance. Alley’s observation that state-sponsored monuments organise space, history, and popular memory is pertinent here, while also reminding us that such meanings remain historically unstable (Alley, 1997).

Urban design performs much of this curatorial work. The long vista, controlled focal points, landscape symmetry and ceremonial procession give the precinct’s national symbolism an unusual spatial coherence; the recent redevelopment adds pedestrian routes, underpasses, vending kiosks, exhibition panels, lighting and reordered amenities intended simultaneously to support mass civic use and preserve the integrity of the monumental composition. The relevant question is how ceremonial order and ordinary public occupation are made to coexist within the same composition.

Ghertner’s “rule by aesthetics” is applied cautiously. His analysis of world-class Delhi concerns situations in which desired urban appearances acquire consequences for legitimacy and spatial order (Ghertner, 2015). Kartavya Path raises a related question: when heritage restoration, public improvement, national representation, and visual order converge, what image of the national capital is being made perceptible? The case reveals reinscription within a spatial field that remains historically layered and publicly inhabited.

3.2. Statue of Unity: Monument, Infrastructure, and Development

The intended symbolism of the Statue of Unity is unusually direct. Dedicated to Vallabhbhai Patel and inaugurated in 2018 as the world's tallest statue, it monumentalises Patel as a figure of national integration and territorial unity. The dedication of soil and Narmada water, the Wall of Unity, ceremonial prayer, museum and elevated viewing gallery embed commemoration within a carefully curated visitor experience.

Notably, the visitor looks not only at Patel but from Patel: the viewing gallery frames the Narmada, the Sardar Sarovar Dam and the surrounding ranges as part of the experience. Around it, the state has subsequently developed gardens, tourism attractions, transport infrastructure, accommodation and recreational facilities, while official narratives explicitly connect this transformation to regional development, employment and tourism. The visual-spatial field binds together monument, landscape and infrastructure. Brian Larkin’s account of the “politics and poetics of infrastructure” is useful here: infrastructures perform technical functions but also produce sensory and symbolic worlds through which promises of modernity become materially apprehensible (Larkin, 2013). Here, development itself becomes part of what the monument signifies.

Debord’s spectacle is valid here not because of monumental scale alone, but because political representation is organised through images, tourism, and consumption, through which unity and development are made mutually reinforcing (Debord, 1967/1994). Monumentality here becomes spatially extensive: the political figure is observed and read through a destination assembled around him.

The apparent coherence fractures, however, when the frame is widened further. Aditi Chandra opens Unruly Monuments with precisely this case, juxtaposing the monument's claim to national unity with protests by Adivasi farmers who argued that the statue and associated tourism development threatened land and water access. For Chandra, their bodily occupation and contestation of the monument demonstrate the instability of a national monument as an uncomplicated signifier of an inclusive nation (Chandra, 2025). This is more than an alternative “interpretation” of a symbol. It exposes a material conflict over the landscape through which the symbol acquires its public significance.

The case extends monumentality beyond the object into the territorial relations. The same territory can be staged as national integration, infrastructural achievement, and developmental promise while being contested through competing claims to land, water, livelihood, and belonging. The visual-spatial field here becomes territorial in extent.

3.3. Kempegowda at the Airport: Regional Memory and Global Aspiration

The 108-foot bronze statue of Nadaprabhu Kempegowda at Bengaluru’s international airport is officially titled the “Statue of Prosperity.” It commemorates Kempegowda, the city’s founder, explicitly linking historical memory to Bengaluru’s subsequent growth. The statue stands within the city’s principal international gateway- a space organised around mobility, infrastructure, investment, and global metropolitan identity.

It was unveiled alongside Terminal 2 in November 2022. Terminal 2 was itself presented as both globally competitive infrastructure and an expression of place—a “terminal in a garden” drawing on Bengaluru’s Garden City identity while incorporating Karnataka’s art and culture, sustainability, and technology. Historical founder, regional culture, technological infrastructure, and global mobility thus become adjacent signs within a curated airport landscape.

This makes Augé’s description of the airport as a paradigmatic ‘non-place’ useful primarily as a proposition to question. (Augé, 1995). Adey demonstrates how airport architecture organises movement, vision, and affect, while Addie’s concept of “aero-regionalism” situates airports within competing city-regional projects that are simultaneously territorial and globally networked (Adey, 2008; Addie, 2014). Kempegowda at the airport makes this tension literal: a figure mobilised to anchor local historical identity stands within an infrastructure predicated on transregional and international movement.

The semiotic tension here lies less in overt opposition than in translation. What happens to regional memory when it is made to speak the language of metropolitan prosperity and aspirational branding? A complex urban history is condensed into a narrative compatible with Bengaluru’s projected image as a globally connected city.

The visual-spatial reading follows the monument into the wider airport precinct: road approach, terminal architecture, landscape, signage, passenger movement, and commissioned cultural imagery. Urban design mediates between rooting and mobility, spatially associating global infrastructure with a locally recognisable identity while simultaneously reframing that identity through contemporary metropolitan aesthetics.

3.4. Durga Puja Pandals: Ritual, Temporality, and Collective Production

Durga Puja unsettles the analytical sequence established by the first three cases because its “institutional proposition” is difficult to locate in a single institution. A contemporary Kolkata pandal may simultaneously be a sacred enclosure, temporary architecture, commissioned artwork, neighbourhood project, sponsored environment and destination for mass urban circulation. Tapati Guha-Thakurta's In the Name of the Goddess tracks the emergence of the contemporary Puja as a new civic and public-art event, including the rise of the theme puja, professional artists and designers, awards, sponsorship, tourism and new forms of spectatorship (Guha-Thakurta, 2015). Manas Ray similarly stresses the festival's extraordinary scale and cosmopolitan public presence (Ray, 2017). The case does more than extend the category of public art: it tests where that category itself begins and ends.

Here spatial staging is temporary but extensive. Streets acquire thresholds and entrances; queues produce new routes; bamboo, fabric, light and sound construct temporary interiors; familiar neighbourhoods acquire altered landmarks and hierarchies; pedestrian movement replaces or competes with ordinary traffic. Movement through the altered city becomes part of the artwork's experience. UNESCO's 2021 inscription recognises Durga Puja in Kolkata as both a public performance of religion and art and a site of collaborative artistic production characterised by large-scale urban installations and pavilions. The very difficulty of separating idol, pandal, route, crowd and ritual supports the paper's relational proposition more directly than any of the permanent monuments.

The semiotic configuration is correspondingly heterogeneous and dense. Devotion coexists with artistic authorship; neighbourhood identity with citywide tourism; handcraft with professional design; the sacred with corporate sponsorship; temporary materiality with increasingly durable heritage recognition. Guha-Thakurta's work is valuable precisely because it resists reducing this condition either to religious ritual or to an uncomplicated transformation into “art.” The category of public art is negotiated through artists, committees, awards, media, sponsors and spectators.

Collective production should not be romanticised as implying equal capacity to shape the relational environment. Access, recognition, and visibility remain structured through budgets, sponsorship, club networks, artistic reputation, municipal regulation, policing, crowd management, and highly differentiated locations. Sponsorship itself becomes spatially visible in gates, advertisements, and temporary constructions.

Durga Puja begins with a field that is already distributed, provisional, and recurrently remade. Spatial mediation is dispersed among committees, artists, fabricators, municipal agencies, police, sponsors, hawkers, and moving crowds. Its critical contribution lies in showing a condition in which co-production precedes any stable distinction between artwork, setting, producer, and audience.

4. Who Controls Meaning After the Artwork Enters Public Life?

The four cases expose a central asymmetry. Institutions can intentionally frame artworks, but intended propositions compete with memory, use, ritual, other histories, and other claims on space. The question is therefore who has the capacity to structure the conditions under which meaning emerges—and what remains beyond that control.

4.1. Staging Meaning: Public Art as an Aesthetic Instrument of the Postcolonial State

State-backed public art does not function as straightforward propaganda, nor does the state speak with a single voice. The postcolonial state is itself institutionally dispersed, historically layered, and frequently contradictory. As an aesthetic instrument, public art is a material-spatial means to frame preferred political narratives for public encounter—through material presence, spatial prominence, and visual legitimacy. The term identifies a mode of constructing a visual-spatial field, while distinguishing the power to construct a frame from the much less certain power to secure what that frame will mean.

This capacity has a particular history in India. Guha-Thakurta has shown how colonial and postcolonial institutions did not merely preserve pre-existing cultural objects but participated in producing the categories through which monuments and artworks became legible as antiquity, heritage, art, and eventually embodiments of national culture (Guha-Thakurta, 2004). Chatterjee’s account of anticolonial and postcolonial nationalism similarly complicates any assumption that national modernity simply replaces colonial forms, locating the postcolonial nation within continuing negotiations among inherited governmental forms, cultural difference, and projects of modernisation (Chatterjee, 1993). Public art enters this unstable territory as one means of materialising selected histories and valorising particular relationships between past, territory, identity, and political present.

The cases reveal different modes of such staging: reinscription at Kartavya Path, territorialisation at the Statue of Unity, and translation at Bengaluru airport. Aesthetic production in Durga Puja is dispersed across civic, ritual, artistic, commercial, and regulatory actors.

The distinction between staging and determining meaning is crucial. Hall’s encoding/decoding model is useful as an analogy: cultural production can privilege certain readings without securing identical readings at reception (Hall, 1980). Public art, however, exceeds the bounded media text because its “message” is distributed across landscape, infrastructure, visibility, circulation, and regulation. Rancière’s notion of the distribution of the sensible is particularly relevant: politics and aesthetics meet in the organisation of what becomes perceptible, whose presence is legitimised, and what receives spatial prominence (Rancière, 2004).

Ghertner’s “rule by aesthetics” sharpens this argument where aesthetic representation acquires regulatory force. In his account of world-class Delhi, judgements of desirable urban appearance become consequential for legitimacy, order, and belonging (Ghertner, 2015). Aesthetic governmentality is not synonymous with the aesthetic instrument proposed here. The latter concerns the capacity to stage political narratives materially and spatially; Ghertner becomes relevant where such staging begins to regulate what may remain visible, what appears out of place, or what must be reordered.

4.2. The Mediation of Urban Design

How, then, does formal staging become a public encounter? Much of this mediation occurs through urban-design practices and decisions that translate priorities into material arrangements of access, visibility, circulation, and proximity.

Setha Low’s distinction between the social production and social construction of public space helps locate this mediation. Social production concerns the political-economic and institutional processes through which spaces are materially produced; social construction concerns the experiential and symbolic processes through which they are inhabited and understood (Low, 1996). Public art sits across this distinction. Authorities, designers, developers, and institutions may have substantial influence over the production of its spatial setting.

Across the cases, this mediation operates through recurring spatial mechanisms rather than a single formal language. Axis and focality can organise attention; approach and sequence can choreograph anticipation; thresholds and security can regulate proximity; infrastructure and surrounding development can attach wider narratives to an artwork; temporary occupation and circulation can reorganise an existing urban setting. These decisions structure what is encountered first, what remains peripheral, how long an artwork is visible, and whether it is approached ceremonially, consumed as a tourist attraction, passed in transit, or experienced through bodily participation.

The limits of this material ordering become visible in everyday use. De Certeau’s distinction between institutional strategies and everyday tactics is useful for understanding how planned material orders may be used in unintended ways (de Certeau, 1984). Movement, occupation, photography, ritual, or informal use can generate trajectories and associations that exceed original design. Such practices should not, however, be romanticised as resistance. The capacity to appropriate or reinterpret a space is not equivalent to the capacity to locate, redesign, regulate, police, or erase it.

Mediation is thus structurally unequal. Some actors possess the authority and resources to alter the material or regulatory frame; others primarily contest, negotiate, or appropriate it. The disciplinary implication is more precise than the familiar claim that urban design is political. Urban-design decisions structure the probability of particular encounters and readings without securing their outcome.

5. Conclusion: Co-Production Is Not Equal Power

Across the four cases, meaning emerges through different configurations of spatial framing, institutional authority, infrastructure, ritual, memory, and everyday contact. Reinscription, territorialisation, translation, and distributed production each show that the visual-spatial field is assembled differently, producing different modes of public engagement and interpretation.

The cases also clarify a more consequential distinction: power over meaning is not the same as power over the conditions under which meaning is produced. Institutions may possess disproportionate capacities to commission, locate, monumentalise, regulate, and transform the setting, while interpretations within that field remain open to negotiation, appropriation, and contestation. The politics of public art therefore lies in who gets to construct the field within which meaning becomes legible.