Hindu pantheon descends on Toronto

[suchandra 1]

"Visions of how the world was created", seems a nice approach to make people aware of God. The VEDAS actually give the best explanation about Creation, other Holy Books hardly touch this topic.

 

 

Hindu pantheon descends on Toronto

PTI

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1188904

Tuesday, September 09, 2008 19:53 IS

 

TORONTO: Lord Krishna, Shiva the destroyer, goddess Kali, Ganesh and Lakshmi have descended on downtown Toronto in all their splendour and glory.

They are part of a remarkable installation of moving images of Hindu gods put together by Indo-Canadian filmmaker Srinivas Krishna.

Aptly titled 'When the Gods Came Down to Earth', the installation is on view at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) on Bloor Street Plaza here round the clock all through the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

The show is a joint project of TIFF's Future Projections section and the museum's Institute for Contemporary Culture. It runs until the last day of TIFF -- September 13. Projected day and night in random progression on a large LED screen designed as a beacon set off against ROM's stunning Lee-Chin Crystal, the moving images represent a vital re-imagining of "the Hindu gods in their most iconic and magical moments".

This, Srinivas Krishna explains, "is a public art installation at the crossroads of ancient myth-making and modern technologies of mass media. Its iconic images draw on the sacred stories I learned as a child growing up in India."

These stories, the Toronto-based filmmaker says, were "of gods and goddesses, humans and demons" and they projected "visions of how the world was created and tales of how, from time to time, the gods came down to earth to rid the world of evil".

 

The installation, which stands tall in the midst of a plaza at the end of an arcade of glitzy shops selling the world's most coveted fashion brands -- Louis Vuitton, Hugo Boss, Chanel and Versace -- captures the way in which Indian artists have utilised mass media -- printing press, posters, comic books, cinema and television, among others -- to give visual shape to the Hindu gods for more than a century.

To achieve his end, Krishna, whose oeuvre includes films like Masala and Lulu, besides a slew of television dramas and mini-series, has used a mix of classical Indian dancers, live action footage, eye-catching visual effects and lively animation to trace the history of how these mass-produced artistic visualisations turned into sacred icons worshipped by millions of devout Hindus.

Krishna, who is currently writing a sci-fi thriller based on Canadian novelist Robert J Sawyer's The Terminal Experiment while directing his first documentary, Ganesh: Boy Wonder, says: "My images are inspired by... a populist style commonly known as Calendar Art"... My images are intended to enchant viewers with their beauty and fantasy, while provoking interest in their underlying stories."