Bollyworks
Essential to this series is the concept that the fantasy of cinema has overtaken the ethereal world of religion. Film critics have called popular Indian cinema a new religion in which themes of sacred and profane love, good against evil, escape from reality, and tradition versus modernity are negotiated on screen for a wide spectrum of audiences.1 Significant imagery is reduced to decoration, just as the medium of television or film distills politics or current events into entertainment.
A multi-billion dollar industry that annually makes twice as many films as Hollywood, popular Indian cinema – also known as Bollywood – has devotees throughout the world. In 1998, I spent three months in the rural town of Jaisalmer, in Rajasthan. I was there to document the conditions of a 12th-century maharaja’s palace and, in the process, got hooked on Bollywood. When I later moved to Jackson Heights, New York, I resumed my exploration of Indian films through neighborhood DVD shops and the Eagle Theater, which showed the latest from Mumbai (Bombay).
In 2002, I started worked with themes related to the conjunction of Western art historical formats and South Asian popular culture as portrayed in film. This series of Bollywood-inspired objects or “Bollyworks” documents my experiences watching Hindi cinema and is one manifestation of my travels in India.
Many of these mixed-media works are constructed as devotional objects combining varied religious iconography while remaining closely linked to a film’s characters or narrative. Typically, I construct each work around a particular title, star, or motif, choosing images from key dramatic moments in a story.
1 Mishra, Vijay. Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire. Routledge (New York), 2002.