The director of Elizabeth and Bandit Queen tries his hand at installation art, finds out Davina Raisinghani

Neatly tucked away in a mystical-looking wing of the Swarovski Crystal Palace in Austria — which incidentally also plays host to works crafted by the likes of Picasso and Salvador Dali — is an intriguing moving picture installation entitled Sankalpa.

The popular creation is the brainchild of British star architect David Adjaye. And collaborating with him on this project was none other than the Indian filmmaker who gave world cinema the Oscar-nominated Elizabeth as well as the controversial Bandit Queen: Shekhar Kapur.

So when exactly did the director morph into an artist? Or is this a one-off instance?

“I have always been interested in art. Paintings, and especially sculptures, fascinate me,” says Kapur, who was recently in Dubai for the launch of Art Lounge, a brand new art gallery at the Grand Hyatt.

Filmmaking in itself involves a lot of designing, he adds. “I’ve often co-designed the sets of my movies. But quite recently, I made a film called Passage in Argentina, which was funded by Swarovski,” says Kapur of his short film which featured a musical score by A R Rahman and starred Julia Stiles, Lily Cole and Haley Bennett. “Swarovski liked the design on that so much that they asked me to create a video installation for them based on the film.”

Kapur goes on to highlight certain aspects of the installation: 10 screens of varying luminosity and reflectivity including two made completely of miniature crystals, seven projectors and a sound and light show that perpetually plays out on repeat.

Visitors to the Swarovski Crystal Palace also claim that the creation bears a disturbing, maze-like feel; “People often tell me that they walk in and just don’t know how to get out. But that was always the intention: to build something with such an immersive concept attached to it that no one can walk away,” explains Kapur. The installation will remain in its current setting until November next year.

These days, he is busy putting together another piece for Swarovski entitled Frozen in Time. The theme for the sculpture is rooted in Kapur’s new-found passion for water activism, and will be a projection of how things will be in 50 years, when resources would have dried up.

“I have turned into a very passionate environmentalist... I was extremely moved by what I thought would happen to the world without water and so I started to plan a film around it,” is how Kapur explains his latest project, Paani, a motion picture which Kapur claims is on as large a scale as Elizabeth. It will tell the tale of two parts of a city that go to war over water resources and the love story that develops amidst the hostile environment. “I wrote about that idea on my blog and it caught the attention of some water activists. That’s how I became the face of the water organisations in India.”

Currently, Kapur is also working to float his ‘Bathe in a Bucket’ campaign in India and the US simultaneously. The doctrine is simple: instead of wasting over six buckets worth of water when taking a shower, bathe by using just a single bucketful.

The filmmaker strongly believes that if he can sell the idea to 
Hollywood actor Brad Pitt then perhaps the star’s fans, along with majority of the nation, will pick it up. “When I was a kid, my grandfather in Delhi had a hand pump to 
extract water from under the ground. Back then, if you pressed 
it once, you got a heavy flow of 
water. Ten years later, you had to press it ten times before a trickle came out.”

“Now that pump stands in the very same place, but there’s absolutely no water. One can’t help but be a water activist in today’s times, because the consequences of not having enough water in the future are terrible,” he says.

davina
@khaleejtimes.com