Tsunami

Here, the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami is imagined by Sonia Chitrakar (India b.1998) as Kali, the goddess of death and destruction, devouring everything in her path. Kali is shown in the top frame of Tsunami and Ganga the river goddess calmly rides a dolphin in the lower frame, but in between are cars, helicopters, televisions and modern buildings.

Patachitra, or ‘pats’, are scroll paintings from West Bengal, intimately bound up with itinerant storytelling and songs. Historically, patachitra were cloth scrolls on which mythological or epic stories were painted as a sequence of frames. The artists (patua) would travel from village to village, slowly unrolling the scrolls and singing the stories. Patachitras have been compared to cinema frames or animation, and are said to be one of the oldest forms of audiovisual communication.

Exhibited in 'The 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art' (APT8) | 21 Nov 2015 – 10 Apr 2016