Trespassers is an art collective based in Kerala, India, that produces vivid mural art in public spaces, playing with scale and perspective in their portrayal of the observed, the implied and the imagined. The collective has six active members – Ambady Kannan, Arjun Gopi Nadh, Jinil Manikandan, Pranav Prabhakaran, Vishnu Priyan and Jatin. There is a seventh member, Vishnu Kumar, who is currently inactive, and will resume participation in Trespassers soon. The members met in college, and their partnership was sparked by a shared interest in how they might extend their individual fine art practices outside gallery spaces.
Manikandan explains to STIR: “We wanted everyone to experience our art. Common people are not familiar with gallery spaces, so we decided to work on public walls in order to disseminate our practice. In their everyday lives, people will pass by the walls we work on. Through their day-to-day activities, they will come to understand our practice.”
Trespassers are also in dialogue with gallery culture, having recently participated in the exhibition Who Are These Outsiders? (February 4-12, 2023) followed by Outsiders (April 13-May 21, 2023), curated by the Indian artist Amitabh Kumar for Gallery XXL in Mumbai, which is a young art gallery for post-graffiti and urban contemporary art. Recently, Trespassers also collaborated with the not-for-profit organisation St+art India at Sassoon Docks, Mumbai. “[Gallery XXL], found us through St+art India and suggested we do something on canvas with them,” Manikandan says. “Sassoon docks before that was the first time we did something indoors.”
Manikandan expresses a desire to capture the imaginations of children through the collective’s mural making practice. He points to the 19th-century Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma, who revolutionised accessibility to art in India by printing calendars featuring his work, and tells STIR: “If we successfully extend our work into the public space, then the next generation will have greater awareness of this practice, and will themselves produce graffiti art and murals in the future.” He is, however, quick to make a distinction between the two, and positions Trespassers squarely within the realm of mural making. The artist says: “We are muralists. We always ask for permission prior to beginning a mural and try to take public support or make it a collaborative process. We are contributing elements to an existing space.” While most of the public collaboration Manikandan is referring to entails creative inputs from interested onlookers, the collective has also undertaken projects in collaboration with institutions, most notably, with schools across both general and special education streams.
Trespassers’ commitment to maintaining a warm, collaborative relationship with their audience is certainly a positive, however it is also rather ironic, considering the group’s name. When asked about this, Manikandan responds with good humour, explaining that the name has nothing to do with property trespassing, but rather is meant to reference the collective’s desire to embed their visual art within the imaginations of the people that come across their works. In his words: “We want to unconsciously contribute to someone’s visual memory. That is where the name ‘Trespassers’ comes from. We are trespassing into the mental space of our audience.”
The group has a decentralised structure, extending into their creative process, with one member beginning an image and another adding to it, and so on until the project is complete. Manikandan says: “Until it ends, we don’t know what the result will look like.” A large part of Trespassers’ public collaboration comes from the collectives’ efforts to instil a nostalgic sentiment for a bygone Kerala within their work, through the creative inputs of folks whose lived memories stretch beyond the period of rapid development that the state, and indeed large swathes of India, are now seeing. In particular, elements of Kerala’s rich cultural heritage such as traditional boats and headgear associated with the Kathakali dance form pop out from within the visual tapestries that the collective weaves. Manikandan expands on this, saying: “we undertake a data collection process before starting to work. We ask the people around the site to share childhood experiences and memories with us. These also find their way into our work.” After thinking for a moment, he adds: “You will see less electronics and plastic items in our murals. This is not conscious, but I have observed it.”
The Trespassers collective is steadily expanding its public art footprint across India, having presented works in Mumbai, as mentioned earlier, and more recently, through a project undertaken in collaboration with the Vayeda Brothers, who work in the Warli folk art style, at Azim Premji University in Bangalore. Meanwhile, the collective’s community-centric work and collaborative projects with educational institutions continue to foster an appreciation for mural making among audiences of all ages in Kerala, laying the seeds for the growth of an underrepresented medium in Indian art.