Charuvi agrawal’s work marries installation art with technology, mythology and has elements of interactivity
Miniature sculpture of Dr Abdul Kalam.
Hyderabad: When Charuvi Agrawal was named as one of the “emerging 10 who would transform the global artistic landscape” at the Incredible India@60 Festival in New York, it wasn’t a mere felicitation, but a prophecy waiting to come true. Seven years later, Charuvi organises a show like none other, a show where mythology meets technology, and both culminate in art.
The irony lies in the fact that Charuvi, who made it into the Limca Book of Records for her miniature clay sculptures of contemporary political figures called “Claytronics”, has this time designed a gigantic 25-foot installation using 26,500 golden bells connected to each other through fishnet wires. In front of the installation lies a pair of khadau (traditional Indian footwear), touching which would make all the 26,500 bells ring simultaneously.
“When this project started, it was just supposed to be a short film of 13 minutes’ duration. But when the producer backed out, I had already given it eight to nine months of my life, and a lot of resources. So I decided to keep it alive and what started as a commercial project, turned into my baby over the next two years. And of course I couldn’t promote the film the way it was supposed to be promoted. So I decided to transform it into something else and it kept evolving with a lot of ideas coming in and finally took this shape,” says Charuvi.
And this shape involves the original film (that went to seven Oscar qualifying festivals last year and is doing the rounds of festivals in India this year), the interactive installation of Hanuman, 25 3D-printed and hand-painted figurines of the characters from the film, a hologram, an interactive Google and iPhone app, an interactive installation using XBox Kinect that highlights the chakras of any person standing in front of it and a traditional Rajasthani kavad with a twist.
Charuvi explains, “Kavad is an ancient folk art from Rajasthan that uses intricately hand-painted narratives to tell folktales. We have created a large 8’x16’ kavad with Hanuman’s story hand-illustrated on the wooden panels. But the new aspect added to it is that we have shelves carved on the panels and have placed some important elements of the story in those shelves. Like on the panel that tells the story of Hanuman carrying Rama’s ring to Sita, we have recreated the ring and placed it in that panel. The intention is to give life to our belief system. Just like Sherlock Holmes never existed but we have a Baker Street, why can’t we have elements that make our belief systems more real?”
While the whole project is shaped around the story of Hanuman, Charuvi claims to be an atheist. “I didn’t even understand the text that was given to me by the producer who was a strong believer of Hanuman. So I went to Varanasi and spent a lot of time there researching the project. An interesting thing I have noticed is that whenever one creates anything around Indian mythology, many characters always turn out to be white-skinned. But I wanted to keep the Indian essence intact, after all it’s and Indian tale. So I have actually based most of the characters of asuras on my relatives,” she laughs.
Another interesting aspect of the whole show lies in the posters that are used to promote the installation. If scanned through a cellphone, you could see Hanuman appearing from the poster into your phone.
“That’s what I see as the future of the art. Won’t it be amazing if you enter a room and art just begins to interact with you? Art has to constantly evolve. After all it started from cave paintings, and see where we are today,” says Charuvi.
( Source : dc )
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