Kollywood Billboards at the Kunsthal Rotterdam

The iconic Rem Koolhaas-designed Kunsthal Rotterdam played host to an exhibition I curated of one of the most striking aspects of the Indian street: the hand painted cinema billboard. Nowhere is the cinema billboard (or ‘hoarding’) more larger-than-life than in the South Indian state of Tamilnadu, home to ‘Kollywood’, the prolific Tamil film industry. Painted entirely by hand until the mid 2000s, this art form is inexorably commercial in origin, persuading a sale as well as sustaining visual attention and pleasure. The aesthetics it employs has a complex history, tangled in local political imagery, the male gaze, colonial advertising labels, theatre backdrops. My partner in the project - the noted writer, scholar and feminist historian V. Geetha and myself approached one of Chennai’s most sought-after billboard artists M. P. Dhakshna, to create a new series of images that reimagined this commercial art form as a narrative one. The paintings were turned into a book ‘The 9 Emotions of Indian Cinema’ and exhibited at the Kunsthal Rotterdam for three months in conjunction with the launch of the Dutch edition of the book by Mets & Schilt Publishers.