Restaurants, shops and workspaces are draped by an imaginary in bright colours and fun, provocations and piousness. A religious icon, a national flag, a dish of temptation, a body that beckons and seduces, a simple name of a shop that is stylized to become larger than life, even an overstated ambition – these street signs cover the entire gamut of everyday life.

For Sánchez and Seth, they are part of a larger family of artistic expression that needs to be chronicled because they are produced by fellow artists with whom they share a similar sentiment: that of observing everyday life and expressing it to a local audience. They represent a direct relationship with the world of commerce, lightly draping the commodity in the costume of a gift – but more transparently than ‘fine art’. They are striking because they are simple in sentiment, direct in intention and as comforting as a childhood memory – because in some way or the other they have become part of our collective consciousness.

The fact that a street from a city in the Dominican Republic and India can flow into each other through these signs says something about how countries with such contrasting histories and geographies can have so much in common. Basically, urban worlds and their people who share a certain kind of collective dream. These dreams exist today as a repository of images that continue to inspire. Their flow may have been ruptured by the world of digitization and electronic reproduction – but they still emerge in our memories as part of a past that refuses to fade away. This exhibition is not just an attempt to document their ephemeral existence, but a timely stimulation. By ensuring they remain firmly embedded there, the archiving artists are mischievously incepting our imaginations and reminding us of the larger universe in which all artists and their art live in.