This piece was commissioned by Calgary On Purpose for their Artist As Listener series during the 2025 Calgary civic election. All words by CONTRA, all photography is by Jemmy Lu.
In one of my favourite movies, Madras (2014, Dir. Pa Ranjith), a giant mural looms over a neighbourhood in North Chennai, the city where I was born. The wall is a hotly contested civic canvas in the film, wherein two rival political factions are locked in a long and violent dispute over the space, each determined to claim it for portraits of their leaders. I have been thinking about Madras a lot these days. For many reasons.
To begin with, I only recently realized how deeply this film has been lodged in my subconscious. Nearly a decade later, my work would take me into the strange, charged, and symbolic world of public art in the other city I would come to call home: Calgary. Madras is ultimately a film about art, identity, and politics, moving in and out of each other’s spaces, using the other to influence and command power. These images have stayed with me, like something buried and waiting, and when I began working in public art, I recognized the same language on different walls and rooms: everything is a fight for our ideas and imagination.
In Chennai, and in the state of Tamil Nadu more broadly, politics doesn’t exist without art. Film stars rise through the glory and fanfare of silver screen heroism and cross into the murky political stage. Legacy political parties launch their sons, daughters, nieces, and nephews into cinema, understanding that ultimately art, and film, wields the power to shape and shift the ideas of millions in ways few other mediums can. Neighbouring states in South India have watched this dance between cinema and politics with caution and alarm for nearly a century, its roots going back to the 1930s, becoming a decisive political force by the 1950s.
In Madras, the mural is both a political advertisement and a testament to power and dominance. People live and die under the rules made and unmade beneath the gaze of the new political leader. The film suggests that the public art site (here, a crude machine of propaganda) is where belonging is negotiated and where new futures are born. These are ideas that stay with me in our landlocked city in the prairies, as my work takes me into a world that is both public and underground. Each summer, my colleagues and I walk through alleys, back routes, parking lots, and other public spaces, taking note of what walls might be transformed into large-scale mural sites. ‘Who should we bring? What stories should they tell? Will it resonate? Are we dreaming of a future that hasn’t yet arrived?’
In another part of my practice, in basements, studios, galleries, and set-decked rooms, I work as a filmmaker and producer, listening for the hum of the underground. Through the work we make and document, I try to hold up a mirror, pump fresh blood into cultural conversations, and push us to see above our own heads. Different mediums, and yet we ask the same root questions: Are we dreaming of a future that hasn’t yet arrived?
In a place like Calgary, where the spirit and story is shifting, my creative practices insist that art speaks not only to who we are, but to who we ought to be - imagining new possibilities. In that sense, art and politics are siblings: both ask us to imagine who we might become. Any of our nine mayoral candidates, and the 73 candidates running for counselor across 14 wards, should also be asking, ‘Are we dreaming of a future that hasn’t yet arrived?’ and then maybe, if they’re truly worth their salt, ‘how can we bring that future here?’. Artists, arts producers, and organisers must ask the second question just as much as the first. Us artists and politicians are frankly the same: imagining a new world just beyond the horizon. The challenge is whether the gap between that imagined world and the present is too wide. Or worse, whether the dreamers and the experiencers are speaking a different language.
When I think of the function of our ambitious civic imaginations, and the overt symbolism of the film Madras, I feel that every civic election is also a wall: candidates rush to paint their image on it, hoping to claim the story of ‘the new Calgary’. The question is whether those stories reflect us all.
In the weeks after August, as I walk beneath the paint drying on eight fresh murals programmed through BUMP Festival this year, under which campaign signs for mayoral candidates and counsellor boards have been pitched in a post-summer rollout frenzy, I’ve been turning over two questions: “Who is art for?” and “Who is politics for?” They echo each other, though rarely are they asked in the same breath. And yet, in an election year in Calgary, they need to be (spoiler: it’s tied to those troublesome gaps.
Jumping from mayoral and council debates, to rooms where arts organizers congregate to pitch their vision to front runners, to coffee shops in various neighbourhoods in the city, my ‘feelings’, ever present through the arts, come into a sharp, sobering confirmation: the 2025 Calgary civic election arrives amid real tension, and great widening gaps. My artistic function requires siphoning the noise on the edge, gathering alternative currents, and jettisoning them into the world (well, the part of it I can actually reach. Alberta. Canada, if the wifi holds). Sometimes we negotiate: two mountain murals so that we can travel have one enigmatic esoteric one. One drab corporate campaign so that we can make a short film about time- jinns. One clean, brand-safe idea so we can throw a rambunctious, theatrical fashion runway show in the Palliser. The hope is that the city has room for it all. That the fringe starts to trickle into the mainstream. That our Trojan horsing of more radical ideas slowly changes the shape and sentiment of the place.
This is the quiet strategy of artists and cultural producers in cities like ours: we smuggle in new futures under the surface of what’s palatable. We know the city doesn’t always recognize itself in the mirror, so we give it a reflection it might grow into. But Trojan horses are not a guarantee. Many times, the gates stay closed. Sometimes the gap between the underground and the general public is simply too wide.
Often, I am called into a project to bring into it a certain ‘artistic audaciousness’. I will hear ‘You are the new Calgary! You are the brand! We need your vision!’. Many times, I will be told in the 11th hour that it’s all ‘too much, nobody here is ready for this, we don’t think you can land this plane’ by the same people who let me in. So you see, the gap becomes ever larger between our imagined future and the present. I notice this gap in many other avenues of civic life in Calgary. We are on a high-speed train toward a population of two million with a city largely unprepared for that reality. In the debates, on Reddit forums, late at night at The Ship & Anchor, people panic over the booming population. The same anxieties snake their way through the province, weaponized at higher levels of government and feeding a surreal wave of separatist fervour. Do you see the gaps now?
People who live in the suburbs ask people who live downtown, ‘We have rappers here? We have raves …in Calgary? Nothing happens in this city.’’ Beltline residents ask, ‘Who are they building all that for?’ As if the suburbs were another country. As if the city didn’t belong to itself.
In the playground of our civic election, the gaps are in both how we understand ourselves and each other. Voter turnout is historically low here. In 2021, only about 46% of eligible voters cast a ballot (ahem…in 2025, we will break that record with our turnout ringing in at a mighty low of 39.04%). Many people don’t feel that civic politics touches their lives. Now, there’s the arrival of formal municipal political parties, Communities First, A Better Calgary Party, bringing with it a new layer of performance, branding, and bloc identity, but an unease in what it all means past election day. There are debates over infrastructure, water systems, and public transit that are as much about belonging as they are about engineering. The same anxiety over our rising population emerges in fragments over our ‘safety’. These gaps are far from abstract; they’re physical, social, and psychic. They live in how we move through the city and how we imagine each other’s lives. Everyone claims the city, but few recognize each other as part of the same story.
Really, this is about our collective imagination and how far it can go. An adolescent city is still trying on different outfits in the mirror, unsure which one fits. Calgary wants to be a big city, but often behaves like a small town with new toys. It talks about innovation, but worries about disruption. It dreams of density, but fears rapid change. It craves culture, but flinches at the mess that comes with it. Civic elections reveal these contradictions. They force us to say who we think we are, and just as importantly, who we think we’re not. But the trouble is, we don’t agree. One quadrant dreams of towers and festivals; another wants quiet streets and wide parking stalls. One part of the city demands a bolder cultural future; another says, “We’d like 500 more police officers to clean up the streets, thanks.”
I think of this moment as Calgary’s adolescence. We are somewhere between the mythology we inherited and the reality we’re hurtling toward. The population growth is real. The changes are real. The discomfort is real. But our collective reflection of ourselves hasn’t caught up. This gap shows up not just in civic debates, but in the emotional language of the election. In the Jack Singer Concert Hall at Werklund Centre during the mayoral debate, I sat between two older couples, each of them whispering the same sentence: “I don’t know who to vote for.” It’s almost become a civic refrain: A quiet, exhausted kind of uncertainty.
I’m not quite so sure that it’s apathy, instead, I suggest it’s again those pesky gaps in how we all live and witness and dream. It’s a sort of civic alienation. The people don’t see themselves in the candidates, and the candidates don’t seem to know how to speak to the city’s contradictory heart. On the surface, the campaigns talk about infrastructure, taxes, and growth. Underneath, the real battle is over who gets to narrate Calgary’s future. And I know this, as my work often requires me and the band of thinkers who surround me to demand we get a seat at the ‘Calgary future table’. And not just a pencil sketch of a seat, we want a real one - with weight.
Our public debates talk about the Green Line, but they’re really about whether we see ourselves as a connected city or a collection of disconnected enclaves. When we speak about water infrastructure, what we’re really asking is who can we trust to hold the city together when things break? Initiatives and campaigns boast about “vibrancy,” but we haven’t decided who gets to define what that looks like, or who gets to belong inside it.
In other words, to bring it back to murals, we are trying to paint a portrait while arguing over whose city it is.
The wall, like in Madras, is symbolic. Every election cycle, politicians jockey to cover it with visions of a new Calgary: safer, shinier, more efficient, more alive. But those visions are often incomplete. They tell only one version of the story, the aspirational “idea” of the city, not the lived one. And the people walking beneath that wall know it. In a healthy city, those gaps can become spaces of negotiation. In a brittle one, they become trenches. The more we repeat, “I don’t know who to vote for,” the more we reveal that the language of politics hasn’t caught up to the language of lived reality. I think about this when I’m programming art, about the ways we sneak visions in through the side door. Politicians do it too. Every campaign is a Trojan horse of sorts. Candidates know that a city this unsettled won’t agree on a shared identity, so they package their ideas in language that feels familiar, soft, inevitable. But soft language makes soft leaders, just enough to keep things still, not enough to move anything forward. Progress dressed as nostalgia. Change wrapped in reassurance. Candidates are trying to Trojan horse their ideas into a city that doesn’t quite know what it wants.
So again, sometimes, the gap is just too wide. Sometimes, the wall remains blank.
Our uncomfortable, adolescent city is at a tipping point. I love to say this, I might be saying it too much. But I invoke this phrase with both optimism and warning. A city on the verge of hitting two million, with the potential to be the third biggest metropolis of this nation. We can be whatever we want. But that’s the problem too, isn’t it? We are trying to decide what story to paint on the wall, while the gaps between our ideas, sentiments, civic understanding, and future ambitions widen. By the time you read this, the election will have finished, but the city will still be waiting for its larger answers.
That unsettled feeling is growing. Ideologies and movements encroach, some that feel foreign, others that have always been here, waiting. Sometimes, from the underground where I make and dream, I wonder if I’m part of the fever myself, projecting a future that might never land. And maybe that’s the real fear: that we’ll wake up one day in a city that wears our face but doesn’t speak our language. I return to my question as I walk around the city, filming it, finding it, uncovering it: Who is our art for? Who is our politics for? The wall will not stay blank forever. Power consistently seeks and exploits a vacuum. Those who move fastest, or yell loudest, will write the next chapter. That’s the danger of adolescence: if you don’t define yourself, someone else will.
This piece was commissioned by Calgary On Purpose for their Artist As Listener series during the 2025 Calgary civic election. All photography is by Jemmy Lu.
