WHEN WALLS SPEAK: A National Urban Art Movement Connects India and France

Spanning 15 cities across the country, the festival brings together four internationally recognised artists—two women and two men, three from France (including one from Réunion) and one Indian artist—for a month-long artistic journey shaped by exchange, participation, and shared creation.

Working closely with local communities, students, NGOs, and neighbourhood youth, the artists will create monumental murals that transform public space into a shared creative ground. Each artwork becomes a meeting point—between artists and residents, between India and France, and between individual stories and collective memory.

An explorer of letters and forms, KHATRA—also known as Siddarth Gohil— brings the urban landscape to life through a graphic style that is both bold and meditative. A graduate of the Fine Arts Faculty in Baroda, he reinvents typography by blending it with graffiti, abstraction, and the raw textures of the street, from India to Sweden.

His spectacular murals engage with light, digital glitches, and retroreflective materials, merging the precision of design with the free energy of street art to create a visual language that is unmistakably contemporary.

KASHINK, a leading figure in international street art, defies convention with her vast, vividly colored and deliberately undressed faces. An artist, performer, and committed feminist, she asserts the complete freedom of identity, wearing a drawn-on mustache every day as both an artistic statement and a political act.

From Paris to major capitals around the world, her flamboyant murals challenge social norms, celebrate diversity, and transform public space into a living manifesto for inclusion and equality.

KESADI develops a pictorial practice rooted in observation, movement, and an attentiveness to everyday details. Emerging from graffiti and street art culture, he retains a direct relationship to gesture and image, which he now translates onto various media—primarily canvas and paper.

His work unfolds as a collection of fragments: everyday objects, street scenes, modest architectures, and landscapes encountered during his travels. These elements are first isolated, then recomposed to create images that feel both familiar and subtly off-kilter. Kesadi’s painting avoids anecdote, instead functioning through an accumulation of signs and delicate shifts between the real and the imaginary.

A muralist with a striking, vibrant style, Dey MKO turns every wall into a manifesto. Inspired by her travels and the vitality of urban cultures, she deploys an intense palette of colors and symbols to express the energy of women and their power of resilience.

A committed feminist, Dey MKO advocates for an art form that liberates expression and reimagines public space. Her monumental murals become places of dialogue, emotion, and affirmation. Blending visual poetry with social engagement, her work bridges the personal and the collective with a boldness that leaves a lasting impression.