Statement
The earlier works, Nostalgic Dreams and In Character, established the conceptual and visual foundations of this practice. Nostalgic Dreams operated as a hand-painted investigation board, film posters and character portraits connected by thread, circling back to a central portrait of director Imtiaz Ali, while In Character presented nine systematic portraits of iconic Bollywood actors in role. Both drew on the tradition of hand-painted Indian cinema posters, rooted in artists such as Baburao Painter and B.M. Gupta, whose boldly coloured, expressively composed works once dominated Indian public spaces before digital printing made them obsolete (Mazumdar, 2003). Reclaiming that visual language was not nostalgia for its own sake, but a deliberate alignment with the form of image-making always concerned with emotional communication over photographic accuracy, capturing a feeling, not a likeness.
What those earlier works revealed, however, was where the limits of that approach lay. The flat, high-contrast graphic quality that gave Nostalgic Dreams its installation presence worked against the intimacy the individual portraits demanded. The figures read as bold and recognisable, but they did not feel close. This became the central critical question driving the final work: how to get closer to these characters, not just visually, but in terms of what it feels like to sit with a particular face, expression, or performance.
The answer came through a deliberate shift in medium. Introducing colour pencil, which worked alongside acrylic, changed the nature of what a portrait could do within this project. Colour pencil demands patience, tone built through layered mark-making, shadow and texture emerging gradually in ways acrylic’s opacity resists. The resulting portraits are more nuanced and carry a different emotional register entirely. Where the acrylic works assert presence, the colour pencil pieces invite attention. This was not a rejection of the earlier approach but a conscious extension of it. An acknowledgement that the subject matter itself demanded more than one visual language.
That material evolution is also a conceptual one. The final portraits focus not on Bollywood as spectacle but on individual characters as sites of emotional memory. Figures whose performances shaped an understanding of longing, identity, and what it means to become yourself. For diasporic communities, Bollywood functions as a powerful mediator of identity and an imaginative relationship with home (Banyopadhyay, 2008). Specific characters are tied to specific moments of growing up: watching films as a family, identifying with women onscreen as a teenager, and later forming a more critical relationship with those same images. That critical dimension matters. As Laura Mulvey’s foundational analysis of the male gaze (1975) makes clear, cinema’s visual conventions are never neutral, and Bollywood is not exempt from the objectification and gendered hierarchies documented in its representation of women (Choudhury and Sharma, 2025). The portraits in this final body of work deliberately foreground characters defined by complexity and performance rather than spectacle, reflecting both admiration for these films and an honest awareness of what they sometimes reproduce.
The final exhibition moves from spectacle to intimacy; the bold installation of Nostalgic Dreams, the graphic grid of In Character, and the quieter, more searching colour pencil portraits are brought together as a single arc of development. Bollywood has always operated as more than entertainment; across generations and geographies, it functions as a shared cultural archive, a repository of collective memory that cuts across class, language, and belonging. This practice sits within a larger and urgent conversation about whose stories are told visually, and what it means to render them slowly, by hand, with sustained attention. The journey traced here is not a conclusion but a beginning, one that could extend into other cinematic traditions, other diasporic experiences, and other forms of popular culture that carry the same weight of home.
References
Bandyopadhyay, R. (2008) 'Nostalgia, identity and tourism: Bollywood in the Indian diaspora', Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, 6(2), pp. 79–100.
Choudhury, A. and Sharma, R. (2025) 'Representations of female characters in Bollywood cinema: stereotypes, audience perceptions, and societal impacts', Frontiers in Sociology. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2025.1694300
Mazumdar, R. (2003) 'The Bombay film poster', Seminar, 525.
Mulvey, L. (1975) 'Visual pleasure and narrative cinema', Screen, 16(3), pp. 6–18.