In the cavernous hall of the UN Security Council hangs Picasso's haunting La Guernica to constantly remind the great powers of the horrors of war. But when Colin Powell presented his fictional son et lumiere in that hall days before Iraq's invasion, the painting was covered up for the world's benefit.

Not since that day have art and resistance had so much in common. That is, until WSF 2004 in Mumbai.

What once were factory sheds busy with the industrial whine of turbines are now galleries. The lathes have been replaced by canvases. And uncheckable resistance has taken the place of unchecked exploitation.

Back then the abstraction of market capitalism had to deal with the realism of labour. Now, as then, the abstract deals with the real.

Scores of DVD players hooked to scores of TV screens endlessly play kitsch cinema, documentaries, soaps, protest videos, commercials and, for good measure, white noise.

Paces away, poetry and parecon meet on screen-printed metal sheets. Blood-splattered dresses hang shoulder-to-shoulder with sweatshop-sewn sweatshirts. A pink orchid transforms into the saffron lotus fancied by India's fascist right-wing. A graffito assures "WHEN EVERYTHING IS LOST, THERE IS TOMORROW."

Elsewhere, in a fitting nod to the 'man versus nature' debate, a labyrinthine photographic montage of earthquake-ravaged towns leads to images of the same towns years later laid waste by a bloody communal carnage.

Like the solidarity marches outside, the issues dealt with in the galleries are varied (gender perspectives, race, alternative sexuality, US foreign policy, communalism, corporate greed) and at times irreconciliable (an installation dealing with homelessness stands downwind of another addressing cancerous urban development).

One could well ask "but is it art?" And one could well ask "but is it resistance?" You begin to get somewhere close to an answer as you watch viewers wander from exhibit to exhibit. At times the line separating the art and the viewer is blurred, at times it disappears completely.

And perhaps this interactivity, this organic participation, is what it's all about.

The Security Council's resistance to art will be remembered like one remembers the taste of bile.

But here at the WSF Mumbai 2004, art is resistance itself.