Royal Enfield MotoMural Collaboration
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Goa Open Arts and Royal Enfield collaborated on the MotoMural project where art and machine came together to create exciting and unexpected results. Goa Open Arts invited 5 Goa based artists or collectives to express their art on Royal Enfield motorcycles. The artworks were exhibited at the Rider Mania Festival 2022 in Goa and the collaboration opened up new avenues for Goa Open Arts to present art to a diverse audience.
Diptej Vernekar + Siddesh Chari
Diptej Vernekar is a rising star of Goa’s artistic community. His practice explores how objects, spaces and nature that are constantly in flux become an essential part of one’s identity. His work has been recognised widely and he has been awarded several grants and residencies. He is a founding member of both Goa Open Arts, and of the Goa Artist’s collective, and has been making significant contributions to the local art scene through both these initiatives.
For the MotoMural Project, Diptej is collaborating with fellow artist and Goa Artists’ Collective team member, Siddhesh Chari. He has shown work widely across Goa, including at the Sunaparanta Goa Centre for Arts, and at the Museum of Goa.
The bike design is an amalgamation of popular Goan culture of Narkasur making. The final avatar of the painted bike incorporates ideas of 'beast and masculinity’, and plays with the vibrant colours and decorative aspects associated with the traditional Narkasur artform.
Gopika Chowfla
Gopika Chowfla is one of India's leading visual designers with over 30 years of experience in the field of design and communication. As an artist, she explores themes of self-identity and questions notions of gender norms by choosing to juxtapose traditionally ‘soft, gentle or feminine’ ideas with unusual tactile materials and situations. She works across a range of media including painting, sculpture, photography and mixed-media projects.
For her MotoMural project, she moves away from the ‘ultra masculine’ imagery typically associated with motorcycles and created a pattern of looping snakes like bejewelled bracelets adorning the motorcycle.
Oshine Siva
Osheen Siva is a multidisciplinary artist who imagines new worlds of decolonized dreamscapes, futuristic oasis with mutants and monsters and narratives of queer and feminine power, through the lens of surrealism, speculative fiction and science fiction and rooted in their Dalit and Tamil heritage, Siva.
For the MotoMural project, Siva has created an artwork that predominantly embodies the characteristics of movement, abundance and flow. Inspired by the flora and fauna of the lush Goan ecosystems, Siva imagines a world of hybrid and colourful creatures emulating vibrancy and zeal.
Pradeep Naik
Pradeep Naik is considered to be one of the most influential artists of his generation in Goa. A graduate of Goa College of Art and SN School and Art and communication in Hyderabad, Pradeep is also a co-founder of the prestigious Goa Artists' Collective, and is well known in the community for his work that blends art and architecture.
For the MotoMural Project, Naik will create an earthy abstract landscape on the machine’s body. Use of layered colour fields, rich contrasting tones, and flat horizon lines are a quintessential feature of Naik’s visual language. The motorbike will reflect the rich green and blue hues as it moves through and almost becomes one with a landscape through a ride.
Ramdas Gadekar
Gadekar’s work brings together traditional aspects of Goan cultural heritage and tradition with contemporary ideas and formats, as is evidenced through his signature ceramic tile works. Ramdas is a member of the Goa Artist Collective, and has shown extensively at venues across Goa.
A keen birding and nature enthusiast, Gadekar's motorbike interprets the machine as a Grey Jungle Fowl. The design is also inspired by the tradition of Azulejos, which were brought to Goa by the Portuguese.
