Kolkata: Kolkata has always been a city where art breathes through its streets, stories, and everyday conversations.
Continuing its commitment to making art accessible to all, Asian Paints, in collaboration with the St+art India Foundation, presents St+art Kolkata Festival 2025-26 with The Third Space: Ballygunge Art Project, a citywide celebration of colour, community, and the creative energy that defines Kolkata.
As part of the inaugural St+art Kolkata Festival, supported by Asian Paints, the project unfolds through a series of public art interventions across Ballygunge in South Kolkata.
Drawing from the city’s long-standing adda and rowak culture, the festival explores the idea of a ‘third space’, one that enables sharing, connection, and everyday belonging within the public realm.
Among the core installations is the Colour Corridor inspired by Chromacosm along with a range of urban interventions across the area.
Alongside these outdoor interventions, an indoor exhibition at TRI Art & Culture Centre, developed in collaboration with TRI Art & Culture and supported by KCT Group CSR, anchors the festival’s conceptual inquiry.
Together, the Colour Corridor, the urban interventions, and the exhibition transform familiar neighbourhood spaces into shared experiences by reimagining how citizens gather, pause, reflect, and find a sense of belonging in the city.
The Colour Corridor is a vibrant, immersive passageway that wraps visitors in colour, light, and movement. Created by Sayan Mukherjee, the Colour Corridor is conceived as a sensorial welcome zone, it invites people to slow down, feel, and encounter art as part of their everyday path.
Drawing inspiration from Chromacosm, Asian Paints’ multisensory exploration of how colour shapes mood, memory, and movement, the installation brings these ideas into a tactile experience that Kolkata can walk through.
The corridor also features a specially written Bengali poem, voiced in the accompanying film, a lyrical tribute to Kolkata’s heartbeat. Together, the installation’s physical presence and the conceptual depth of Chromacosm create an experience that makes colour feel alive and meaningful.
It shows that colour is more than an aesthetic; it is a language through which cities express themselves and communities find connection. A typographic façade intervention by street artist KHATRA anchors the Chromacosm experience, which is further animated through augmented reality across the TRI façade and its indoor spaces.
The indoor exhibition at TRI Art & Culture Centre, explores how the lines between home and street often blend in a city like Kolkata. Through immersive works by ten artists, the exhibition reimagines everyday spaces—a bed becomes a place for gathering, a kitchen turns into a space of scent and memory, and familiar sayings appear as visual invitations.
Using colour, texture, sound, and smell, the exhibition creates environments that feel both personal and shared. It invites visitors to reflect on how we find connection and belonging in contemporary cities, where private and public worlds constantly overlap.
Amit Syngle, MD & CEO, Asian Paints Ltd., said, “Kolkata has always been a city that expresses itself through art, colour, and conversation. For Asian Paints, our connection with this city runs deep, shaped by decades of engaging with its artists, craftspeople, and communities. Every project here has strengthened our belief that art doesn’t just transform spaces, it brings people together, encourages dialogue and makes everyday moments more meaningful. With St+art Kolkata and ADDA: The Third Space, we are delighted to bring art directly into the neighbourhoods of Ballygunge, turning familiar public spaces into places of pause, interaction, and shared experience. Our integration, Chromacosm, adds another dimension to this vision by showing how colour can influence emotion, memory and belonging. This festival continues our long-standing journey with St+art India Foundation to make creativity a part of public life, turning colour and imagination into a language that connects people to their city and to each other.”
The Third Space: Ballygunge Art Project emerges from a long-standing collaboration between Asian Paints and St+art India Foundation, rooted in a shared commitment to taking art beyond galleries and into the everyday life of the city.
Guided by the ethos of #Art for All, this partnership has shaped public art districts and interventions across Lodhi, Mahim, Nochi, and other neighbourhoods by transforming overlooked corners into places that bring joy into public life, and invite people to pause, gather, and feel connected.
The St+art Kolkata Festival extends this ongoing dialogue, encouraging people to inhabit art rather than simply observe it. Each intervention is conceived as a lived space: somewhere to sit, converse, pause, and feel connected.
With interventions now unfolding across Ballygunge until January 15, St+art Kolkata 2025 invites citizens to rediscover their city through the lens of art. From tactile installations to poetic murals, every gesture celebrates Kolkata as a place where creativity thrives not in isolation, but in community – where the line between daily life and artistic expression dissolves into one living, breathing conversation.
