Birla Estates gives Worli an artistic lift with its ‘Mumbai Rising’ public art initiative
Worli – the seaside promenade of Mumbai is a hub of colossal energy, exponential growth and a buzzing locality with an ever-growing number of offices, retail, residential, and hospitality spaces. Home to Mumbai’s skyline but also to rapidly growing population, beautification and restoration is now taking centre stage to retain Worli’s livelihood and attraction as the core business and entertainment nucleus of South Bombay.
To uphold the infrastructure of such an engaged-in neighbourhood with a huge number of daily footfall, it is essential for every entity and the people based in the locality to do their bit in perpetuating the area. In line with the vision of the government, which is focused on revamping Worli and slowly upgrading the entire city’s infrastructure along with state of the art recreational facilities, Birla Estates Private Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Century Textiles and Industries Limited (B. K. Birla group) has taken up the responsibility of reconfiguration and beautification of the expanses around Dr Annie Besant Road and Pandurang Budhkar Marg (PB Marg) in Worli as a public art initiative keeping Mumbai Rising as a centre stage theme. The theme is a depiction of the city’s growth from seven separate islands to one of the world’s largest cities charted through the lens of architectural landmarks that have come and gone, as well as those that still stand or are just taking shape. And each of these has left a lasting impression on a city that never stops surging and rising exactly like the theme- Mumbai Rising.
Birla Estates will be beautifying and turning the walls of Pandurang Budhkar Marg (PB Marg) into canvases to paint 10 different stories capturing the nuances of Mumbai city tying everything back to the core theme of Mumbai Rising. In addition to this, Birla Estates has also taken up the responsibility to refurbish pavements and enhance the area on both Dr Annie Besant Road and Pandurang Budhkar Marg (PB Marg) with planters and build a cleaner and greener habitat.
Commenting on the initiative, Mr K. T. Jithendran, CEO, Birla Estates, said – “Mumbai Rising is a public art initiative in line with our credo of maintaining the heritage of our city while creating an interactive ecosystem, which ties back to our vision of being consumer-centric and delivering high-quality spaces at the back of our ideology of LifeDesigned. It is an honour to be able to partake in changing the landscape of Worli for the betterment of the locale.”
This beautification project is part of Birla Estates’ mission to create LifeDesigned spaces, which means to build and nurture the ecosystems around life, for life through the creation of urban canvases that interacts with the people around it.
To bring alive the whole beautification project through a public art initiative, Birla Estates onboarded the Floating Canvas Company, an art and design based startup with a team of some very renowned artists like Mayur Mengle, Osheen Siva, Tanya Eden, etc. and the Aravani Art Project: a collective of diverse women artists who identify across the spectrum as transgender- women, gender-fluid women, and cis-gender women, worked their magic on Pandurang Budhkar Marg (PB Marg) to transform the place around the theme Mumbai Rising.
