NEW DELHI — On Sunday in New Delhi at India Art Fair 2020, Post-Art Project, a studio founded by Gargi Chandola and Yaman Navlakha, was displaying a new “live community artwork,” The Wall: Community Art Building Mural (2020) at the Italian Embassy Cultural Centre booth. Then twenty minutes before the close of the fair, the police arrived. 

....

The Delhi police came to the India Art Fair after hearing that some of the art dealt with the recent political turmoil. “We received a PCR call that some paintings depicting the CAA were being exhibited at the fair,” an unidentified senior police official told the Press Trust of India. “A police team was sent to check it, but no such painting was exhibited.”

According to an Instagram post by Post-Art Project, the police said that they were “responding to an anonymous complaint made about ‘artwork being prepared by someone wearing clothes resembling the women of Shaheen Bagh.’” The post also says that the police took issue with the inclusion of lines of Urdu poetry in one of the paintings in the installation. 

....