BENGALURU: With an aim to introduce lesser-known artists to the general public, Organisational Theatre has started a series of documentary ‘Geniuses of Bangalore’ depicting the lives and work of abstract painters. Ranji David, founder of the theatre group says, that the idea of the series is to reach out to artists who do extraordinary work but are not covered by mainstream media. “We want to know their stories but they aren’t biographies. It’s an introduction to the life and work of these artists,” says the 42-year-old.
The first video of the series was uploaded on June 10.
The video is about abstract artist Bharath Rajpal. It has already got over 1,300 views. Each documentary will showcase an abstract painter. “We are going to share the videos with our partners in Moscow, Milan and Italy. Hopefully, after watching the videos, they might call the artist to showcase his work in galleries in their countries,” he says adding that he is shortlisting abstract artists so that the audience can also grow with abstract and surreal work. “The abstract work is experimental and it is the job of an artist to start showcasing more of abstract work so that people can understand the subject too.”
He says the real challenge is to show the entire journey of an artist in ten minutes. “I have a team of six people that include filmmakers and visualisers.
We worked on it for three weeks in total. There was no technical challenge but the main difficulty was to narrate the life story in just a short duration and doing justice to the artists’ work. People do not have time to watch videos longer than 10 minutes,” he adds.
The next video will be about another artist named Shoeb Dastagir that will be uploaded next month. The documentaries are self-funded, says Ranji.
“After reviewing the work and artist, we shortlist them and do the shoot in their home or studio space. We interview the family and friends as well. Our members have done research on paintings. We just see how
differently or uniquely we can show their work and life,” he adds. Ranji says for him, the journey in paintings began when he had to research for his theatre on paintings. He started to go to galleries and joined a six-month course at Karnataka Chitrakala Parishat. “Then, I started painting on my own. We did a
theatre play on Amrita Sher-Gil. I was keen on pursuing paintings further and became excited and keen to learn other artists’ work,” he adds.