City-Building Through Care And Creative Expression
SPEAKER(S)
Natasha Sharma
Parveen Shaikh
RESPONDENT
Amrita Gupta
Govandi Arts Festival is a community-led arts and culture movement that reclaims, transforms, and celebrates the socio-spatial narratives of marginalised neighbourhoods in Govandi, located on the north-eastern edge of Mumbai within the M East Ward. Govandi is home to Mumbai’s largest resettled population, and the festival highlights the spirit and resilience of local residents through performative and visual arts. Situated in Natwar Parekh Colony, a public housing neighbourhood, the festival amplifies lived experiences, particularly those of women, and foregrounds youth leadership and cultural expression. Through arts-led practices, it strengthens social bonds, activates public spaces, and reimagines urban futures through grounded, co-created processes.
Hosted by the Community Design Agency and co-founded by an artist-architect-social worker trio, the festival transforms a shared vision into collective action through deep community collaboration. Parveen Shaikh, a Govandi resident and the festival’s Community Lead and Organiser, brings over 20 years of experience advocating for slum dwellers and serves as a vital bridge between residents and the collective’s aspirations. Natasha Sharma, who has worked in Govandi for over seven years, serves as Creative Director and Curator, blending participatory research, public art, and design to support communities in shaping their own narratives.
In this panel, the co-founders demonstrate that cities are shaped not only by roads and buildings, but by collective imagination, care, and the participation of communities most impacted by urban inequities. They position art and creative expression as essential infrastructure for care, identity, and collective agency in city-making.
Join us on January 16, 2025
at 6:00pm IST
at 6:00pm IST
Rock Garden, Nerul, Navi Mumbai
Natasha Sharma is an artist, researcher, and curator working in social and urban practice, based in Mumbai. Her work combines artistic expression and social research to create place-based, community-led interventions in public space. Working across film, installation, public pedagogy, and participatory design, her practice engages with lived urban realities. Her projects include Gutter Ki Machhli (Fish in the Sewer), a film exploring local vocabularies of climate change; The Wait Time Project, which transformed metro stations into learning environments; Library of Mats, a site-specific intervention in public parks; and 1 by one, an installation centred on softness and care. Most recently, she initiated Under One Sky (Ek Aasmaan Tale)—a creative ecosystem for arts, learning, and wellbeing co-created with residents of Govandi, one of Mumbai’s most marginalised neighbourhoods.
She is the Co-founder and Curator of the Govandi Arts Festival and leads Public Art and Design programmes at Community Design Agency. Her work has received UNESCO’s Going Together grant (2025), the Arts4Resilience Award (2023), and the Reclaim Art Award (2021). She was invited to Glastonbury Festival (UK) as part of their Diversity Artist Programme (2024). Her film Gutter Ki Machhli was a finalist for Best Indian Short Film at the All Living Things Environmental Film Festival (2024).
Parveen Shaikh is the Co-founder, Community Lead & Organiser at the Govandi Arts Festival with over 20 years of experience in advocacy work for the rights of slum and pavement dwellers. A powerful public speaker, she works at the Community Design Agency (CDA) and has championed the cause of safe formal housing for vulnerable communities at multiple national and international forums as a former member of the National Slum Dwellers Federation. She helped set up the Myna Mahila Foundation in 2015, which works on issues of menstrual health in underserved communities, and was the former President of Navnirman Association, the federation body of Natwar Parekh Colony in Govandi.
At CDA, Parveen engages with government stakeholders, mobilizes the Govandi community, and works closely with women and youth to raise awareness on education, health, well-being, and social entitlements. She works to build consensus among the community to support the Arts Festival. Parveen has been shortlisted as a finalist for the 2025 Women Exemplar Award by CII Foundation, through which she is recognised for her work in youth education and empowerment.