Bollyworks
Since 2002, I have 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 film, star, or motif, choosing images from key dramatic moments in a story.
Significant imagery is reduced to decoration, just as the medium of television (or film) distills politics or current events into entertainment. 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
In 1998, I spent three months in the small, rural town of Jaisalmer, in the state of Rajasthan, in western India. 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 popular Indian films through the neighborhood’s numerous DVD shops and the Eagle Theater, which shows only the latest movies from Mumbai (Bombay).
These mixed media works are the result of my immersion in the world’s most prolific film industry, but also reflect an awareness of my status as a spectator outside of the culture. By examining the “face” of India in its public persona as presented in film, my works seek to simultaneously challenge and celebrate the precepts of Indian cinema and popular culture.
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. As awareness of Indian cinema continues to grow outside of Asia, Bollywood has become one of the most recognizable aspects of Indian culture.
1 Mishra, Vijay. Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire. Routledge (New York), 2002.