Bioscope

Kya paanch lakhki gaadi bhi rukta hai?

Anonymous (Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai?)

The earliest film Rajeshree Thakker recollects watching as a child is Sharmilee. So it is probably unsurprising that for this project she zeroed in on the concept of the double in cinema but she casts a wide net to decide which films to base her works on. Thus she investigates the role of the double right from its popular formulaic approach (Shahrukh Khan as Shekhar/G.One in Ra.One) to a nuanced treatment of it in Hindi cinema (Shahid Kapoor as Charlie/Guddu in Kaminey). Burt she also looks at the way the double disrupts our lives via films like Doosri Sita (Jaya Bachchan as a docile Sita transforming into a vengeful Durga), the double as a romantic projection by the protagonist of a departed beloved on another man (Shashi Kapoor and Rishi Kapoor as Shashi/Karan in Doosra Aadmi) and finally the double as psychiatric disorder (Nargis Dutt as Varuna/Peggy in Raat aur Din). However, apart from such an eclectic choice what is revealing is the form some of these artworks take. Borrowing from the tradition of wooden game boxes, Rajeshree collapses the ideas of Shahrukh Khan as the "Badshah" of "Bollywood" into that of stardom seen as a media-driven game of one-upmanship. For the work based on Doosra Aadmi she creates an interactive window with movable louvers which alternately reveal the faces of the two men in the life of the protagonist (interestingly the word louver can be traced to its origin: lover). Finally Raat or Din is visualised as a wooden box, a container with its two sides depicting the protagonist and her multiple personality disorder.
Rajeshree also examines the idea of stardom and stars becoming ambassadors of popular culture via a series where she "issues" special stamps to pay homage to some stars including Dimple Kapadia and Darsheel Safary. Initially Rajeshree chafed against the curatorial insistence of looking at representation of Goans and Christians in cinema but came around and created two works based on Trikaal and Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai? The Albert Pinto - inspired artwork shows Rajeshree delving into and borrowing from the chitrakar tradition of pats and phad painting to deliver an assemblage which is an ‘epic’ narrative of the marginalised. The interactive work invites the viewer to scroll through various frames from the film embedded within a larger static image on the left. The way the artwork has been conceived suggests that she want to deliberately move away from digital and virtual ways of telling a story.

Excerpted from the catalogue raisonné of the exhibition : Bioscope (2013), curated by Apurva Kulkarni