This collages from Shekhavati juxtaposes idyllic European backdrops sourced from chromolithographic calendars, with Indian narratives. Together they create a figure-ground phenomenon, which crosses over cultures, time and place.
A German winter landscape is reimagined as the playground for Radha and Krishna, figures cut out from popular Calcutta prints. A full moon over a castle on the Rhine becomes an autumnal Sharad Poornima for the itinerant lovers.
As Jyotindra Jain explains, “The eclecticism of visuality also led to a piling up of images from diverse visual sources on one visual plane, and brought into effect an ambivalent language of collage and citation facilitating juxtaposition of Indian and western, traditional and modern, national and subaltern, sacred and erotic elements, on a single receptor surface.”
In the 1920s these curious collages were created by the frame-makers of Calcutta, for wealthy merchants from Shekhavati. They assembled figures from local mythological prints over imported landscapes, visualizing an otherworldly Vrindavan. It is a device that continues to be seen in Bollywood films – elaborate fantasies shot against foreign locates.
About Remix
StoryLTD presents ‘Remix’ by ARTISANS’. This collection of collages from Shekhavati juxtaposes idyllic European backdrops sourced from chromolithographic calendars, with Indian narratives. Together they create a figure-ground phenomenon, which crosses over cultures, time and place.
A German winter landscape is reimagined as the playground for Radha and Krishna, figures cut out from popular Calcutta prints. A full moon over a castle on the Rhine becomes an autumnal Sharad Poornima for the itinerant lovers.
As Jyotindra Jain explains, “The eclecticism of visuality also led to a piling up of images from diverse visual sources on one visual plane, and brought into effect an ambivalent language of collage and citation facilitating juxtaposition of Indian and western, traditional and modern, national and subaltern, sacred and erotic elements, on a single receptor surface.”
In the 1920s these curious collages were created by the frame-makers of Calcutta, for wealthy merchants from Shekhavati. They assembled figures from local mythological prints over imported landscapes, visualizing an otherworldly Vrindavan. It is a device that continues to be seen in Bollywood films – elaborate fantasies shot against foreign locates.
ARTISANS’ brings together ‘Remix’, a selection of ‘Indo-German’ collages from the early twentieth century.