Through an intricate visual piece that characterizes urban life and its dilemmas through the metaphor of an Indian breakfast table, Shambhavi Singh hopes to facilitate a pause and a moment of reflection for the daily commuter, making them ponder upon the rush of daily life. This is mural that represents the rush of daily life as a breakfast table scene. Her imagery integrates scenes of daily life with objects and elements related to food and eating. Shambhavi’s final image manifested as a bustling breakfast table scene integrated with the city’s landscape.
Shambhavi Singh uses art and design as a tool for inquiry, to understand contexts, and then build imagery that can tell a story about those contexts. Her work often makes use of characters, personification and metaphorization and her themes often revolve around the city and ideas around urbanization. Treating the city as something of a theatre production where characters have stories to tell and paths that cross, her work plays with visual narrative structures. Her practice aims to seek out existing stories that are embedded within contexts and activate them in the form of images that can trigger conversation with people.
Shambhavi found her hook fairly early on in the project and it has coloured her work in Art in Transit ever since. The writings of Kabir struck Shambhavi as being particularly relevant to her engagement with ideas around the city and urban life. Her ideas for interventions began revolving around the rush of city life. She began working through visual metaphors to build this image, and she finally arrived at the central theme of food. Food seemed to work at various levels; it was a basic necessity, but it was also something that had larger ideas of bonding, relationships, culture and status attached to it.
