VELOCITY PIECES
Billboard Art (2019 - ongoing)“Grover writes contemplative pieces that anyone can identify with.” - HT Mint Lounge
“For contemporary artist Amitesh Grover, the city is a stage and its people, its astute actors.” - The Indian Express
“The board—a public entity—conveys a private intent, and takes over the road as a spectacle.” - Plural Futures
“A new way of understanding India’s Modern and contemporary art” - The Art Newspaper
For the past few years, I have been writing poems that shine down from a lone billboard on Kasturba Gandhi Marg in Central Delhi. Every week, the board offers a new poem — sometimes an instruction, sometimes an invitation — asking people who pass by to pause, to try, to imagine.
This work began in 2019, at a time when the streets were alive with protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the National Register of Citizens. Later, it lived through the long silences of the pandemic, and then through the shifting moods of the city as we all learned to live with new uncertainties. The poems have become my way of responding to turbulence — with tenderness, with urgency, with words that reach into everyday life.
Over these years, I’ve written and placed more than 200 board-poems. Some suggest collective acts, others are solitary gestures performed with no audience. Together, they form what I like to think of as useful fictions — small choreographies for daily living, experiments in how we might relate to the world differently, even if just for a moment.
The billboard continues to stand in its original place, quietly offering language to the city. To me, it has become a site of political incantation — a call to halt, to reflect, to imagine a different temper for our times.
Conceived & Written by Amitesh Grover | Proofing by Sarah Mariam | Produced by Goethe Instiute / Max Mueller Bhavan, India | Acknowledgement: 100 Velocity Pieces is realised within the framework of Five Million Incidents, 2019-2020 supported by Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan in collaboration with Raqs Media Collective | Venue: New Delhi & Kolkata
Duration: Three years and counting | Language: English | Medium: Public display boards of varying sizes installed at public sites
