In December 2023, I was visiting the India Art, Architecture and Design Biennale at the Red Fort in New Delhi when I came across pseudonymous street artist DAKU's shadow work installation titled 'Cycle of Time'. Although I was familiar with his work — having come across images of his graffiti and installations on the internet — 'Cycle of Time' was the first time I saw one of DAKU’s installations in person. It had a profound effect on me.

As I stood underneath the white lettered canopy of the installation and watched the winter sun move across the grey New Delhi sky, I couldn’t take my eyes off the bright white letters that spelled out the words 'PAST IS PRESENT IS FUTURE IS PAST' again and again and again in a trance-inducing sequence. An allusion to Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity which suggests that there is no clear distinction between past, present, and future, that they are all interconnected and co-exist in spacetime, the installation served as a commentary on the elusive nature of time — with time encompassing the past, present, and future in an ever-evolving continuum of existence.

A pioneering street artist who made a name for himself with his provocative, politically engaged graffiti and public artworks in New Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and many other major Indian cities, DAKU never revealed his identity like his peers Banksy, Tyler, Stik, and Blek le Rat. Nonetheless, it was an open secret among India's art community that the man behind the nom de guerre was Hanif Kureshi — a former ad man and multidisciplinary artist who believed in the power of public art to raise awareness, drive social change, and bring communities together.

An alumnus of MS University, Baroda — one of India’s finest art schools — Kureshi’s diverse artistic practice spanned paintings, murals, and community art projects, and focused on the intersection of art, typography, and street culture. Drawing inspiration from his in-depth research and immersion in the world of Indian hand-painted sign-boards and letters, Kureshi created colourful typographic artworks that evoked the vibrant character and playfulness of Indian street signs and letters.

In his alter ego as the pseudonymous Graffiti artist ‘DAKU’ — which means 'robber' in many Indian languages — Kureshi confronted contemporary socio-political issues such as India’s widening wealth inequality, government apathy and negligence, and the worsening water crisis in Indian cities. In 2010, before the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, he modified several stop signs across the national capital with pithy, provocative messages to trigger public reaction; and in 2016, he placed cardboard cutouts of Mahatma Gandhi wearing a high-visibility vest and holding a broom in the middle of overspilling piles of trash in Bengaluru. It was a not-so-gentle reminder that despite the Indian government’s much-publicised Swachh Bharat national cleanliness mission, India’s cities remained inundated with carelessly discarded waste.

In 2014, in the lead up to the general election which would see the BJP assume the seat of power in New Delhi, DAKU placed four large monochrome paste-ups of a middle finger marked with an indelible ink blot, and cheekily captioned with the Hindi phrase “Mat Do” across New Delhi. A wordplay on the Hindi words ‘Mat’, which means both 'opinion/vote' and 'do not' and ‘do’, which literally translates as 'give', the ‘Mat Do’ graffiti could be interpreted as both 'Do vote' and 'Do not give (vote)'. It cemented DAKU’s legacy as one of the most important street artists to emerge out of India in the 21st century.

In recent years, DAKU had taken a more introspective, philosophical turn towards time as a medium in his immersive, large-scale, “shadow work” installations. Using the natural movement of the sun across the sky throughout the day, these temporary installations — suspended over city-streets using fishnets, or drilled into the sidewalls of street-facing buildings — cast shadows which appeared and disappeared across the surface of the street or on the sidewalls. It was a metacommentary on the unstoppable force of time, and the ephemeral, time-limited nature of street art itself — which always inevitably fades, or is deliberately painted over, erased, or torn down.

Kureshi never publicly acknowledged or addressed his secret life and not-so-secret work as DAKU. Beyond his personal work both as himself and his alter ego, he led several public-facing projects like the Handpainted Type Foundry, a collaborative project which aimed to conserve, archive, and digitise the typographic work of sign-board painters and hand-lettering artists across Indian cities. He also co-founded the St+art India Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that works on street art projects in public spaces to make art accessible to a wider audience by taking it out of galleries and museums and embedding it within city streets — making art truly democratic and for everyone.

A one-man art movement who blurred the boundaries between white cube art galleries and city-streets and side-walls, Hanif Kureshi passed away from complications of lung cancer on Sunday, September 22, 2024. He was 42 years old at the time of his passing. He is survived by his wife Rutva, his son Brahma, and the public art interventions and installations he contributed to across the country.

See Hanif Kureshi's work here.

See DAKU's work here.

If you enjoyed reading this, here's more from Homegrown:

How Indian Artist DAKU Turned The Red Fort Into A Transient Canvas of Light & Shadow

Hyderabad's Billboards Just Got A Hard-Hitting Makeover From Daku

St+art India Returns To Delhi, Transforming Public Spaces Into Works Of Art