Amrita Dhillon // Some Kind of Paradise

About

Amrita Dhillon
Some Kind of Paradise

Vernissage 8th July 2023
6-10pm 

Stil vor Talent Studio
Glogauer Straße 21
10999 Berlin

This brand new series of works from Amrita Dhillon speaks of a nostalgia that comments both on our collective cultural desire for an imagined past and the artist’s own personal formation, born of a culture in which devout traditionalism and technological futurism live side-by-side. 

Her large-scale oils on velvet and canvas each begin with a single-frame cinematic still, appropriated from a selection of Indian motion pictures spanning the 1960s - 1980s. By this process of decontexualization, reinterpretation and recontextualization, these images are freed from the burden of their original narrative, recoding the underlying patriarchal subjugation implicit throughout the original movies’ ostensibly joyful, high-gloss melodrama. Dhillon’s work offers an opportunity to examine what value can be gleaned from the excavation and reactivation of the past — our past images, with all their problems — against the contemporary context of rewrites, whitewashing and historical revisionism. She thus seeks to question and playfully subvert the meaning of images of India, by India — images created to entertain and accrue capital within the world’s largest cinematic economy outside Hollywood — yet which simultaneously function within a complex feedback loop of audience and industry to ultimately reify the social status quo.  

Amrita Dhillon is an artist born in New Delhi, India. She lives and works in Berlin and is currently a student at the Universität der Künste Berlin.