Exhibitions

Street typography is an unspoken part of any city’s visual identity, and Lucknow is no different. The interplay of local tastes, languages and scripts, and techniques showcased by sign-makers provide a new way to experience familiar neighbourhoods. In an urban landscape where digitally-produced signs are prevalent, Lucknow: Letter by Letter was a first-of-its-kind exhibition in the city that celebrated not only the work of local sign-makers, but also the skill and nuance that makes lettering produced by analog methods special. It shines a spotlight on the patterns and peculiarities, motifs and functional attributes that make Lucknow’s street lettering distinctive.

All six issues of the India Street Lettering zines were selected for display in Pulp Society’s show featuring independently-published zines, magazines, books, toys, paperworks and games from India, and praised in a feature about the exhibition in The Morning Standard.

For Indian Institute for Human Settlements’s City Scripts 2024 festival, Pooja put together a collection of photographs from the India Street Lettering archives to respond to the provocation “how does the city speak to you?”, raising questions about language politics, digital v. analog sign-making and its impact on livelihoods, and how material and fabrication techniques used to make signs affect our experience of public spaces. The display also included zines focused on the street lettering in Bangalore’s M.G. Road, and the use of tiles for signage around India.

Letter by Letter was mounted to accompany the screening of the short film of the same name during the B•LORE Short Film Festival (2023). It included street lettering photographs from Indiranagar, Ulsoor and M. G. Road, which were organised in three thematic displays that helped visitors experience the glamourous neon signs of M.G. Road, uncover the language of hand-painted signs through shop boards in Kannada and English, and see letterforms in public spaces come to life when they are built using tangible materials ranging from flowers to metal.