Curatorial note
By Natasha Sharma
Curator & Creative Director
Co-founder, Govandi Arts Festival
One might wonder why would a place like Govandi, home to Mumbai’s largest resettlement population, burdened with the city’s lowest Human Development Index (0.05), and often associated with crime, public health issues, overflowing garbage, inadequate infrastructure, and an everyday reality of socio-economic marginalisation, turn to the arts?
In a place where survival is the priority, why would creative expression matter? Yet, it was precisely this question, this dismissal, that ignited a powerful response from the youth of Govandi. Their answer came through a movement and a question of their own: Humari jagah kahan hai? Humari pehchaan kahan hai? (Where is our place? Where is our identity?)
To answer these questions, we have together created the Govandi Arts Festival, an arts and culture movement, a reclaiming of space, identity, and imagination. What began as a question, has become a bold, ongoing answer written in murals, films, rap verses, board games, performances, and acts of community care.
Building on seven years of arts-led community engagement in Govandi and the transformative impact of our first edition in 2023, we are proud to return with the second edition of the Govandi Arts Festival this December! To witness what happens when young people are trusted, when communities are seen not just through the lens of what they lack, but through the abundance of what they create. This festival is an invitation: to listen, to learn, and to celebrate a future that’s being authored from the ground up.
The 2025 edition of our festival brings together more than double the number of Govandi participants turned artists, from the last one in 2023 – creating a new body of works in the last 6 months through art mentorships, residencies and more. We have a collective of over 100 youth, women and transgender artists from Govandi, a passionate cohort of 25+ mentors, artists residents, and collaborators who have embedded themselves in the neighbourhood, 10+ art forms, and full- 5 days of workshops, screenings, performances, exhibitions, games – explored and grounded in themes of collective care, friendship, migration, natural and built environments and gender identity, which we are thrilled to share.
At the heart of this festival is a simple assertion: Govandi speaks for itself.
Across 10+ art forms that include film, photography, theatre, rap, murals, clowning, public art, game design, and textile-based installations, young artists and community members reclaim the narratives that have long been imposed on their neighbourhood. Their works emerge from lived experiences, of aspiration and fear, of work and precarity, of joy, memory, kinship, and daily negotiations of identity and belonging.
Each project begins with a closer look: a grandmother’s home, a flower seller’s route, the inside of a refrigerator, the quiet terror of the night, the shared jokes of friends, the emotional geographies of the neighborhood, the possibilities of collective action, and the monsters that live in our minds. These intimate starting points open up larger questions of visibility, power, survival, and care. Rather than being framed by deficit, the works reveal Govandi as a place of imagination, labour, and undeniable creative force.
Govandi Arts Festival 2025 is made possible by IMC India and UNESCO x SEVENTEEN’s Going Together Grant Scheme 2025.
Hosted by Natwar Parekh Colony’s Navnirman Association and Community Design Agency.