Jagrut Raval

I did this project while in a 3 month residency at Serendipity Arts Foundation in New Delhi which later was realized as an installation at Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa.

During the residency I started working with a rare earth metal called Bismuth. I was drawn to its unique properties and fascinated by how it could very effortlessly create organic forms. On heating, it changes into something that looks in part futuristic, and in part astoundingly familiar – like ruins of an old civilisation.

With this work I am beginning to inquire about the role of truth in narratives of both the past and future. The videos in this body of work reference the space exploration images we consume on our tv screens produced by technological achievements by European Space agency’s Rosetta mission and NASA’s rover mission to mars. Today, first time in the history of human kind we are the generation who could look at a sunrise on mars and the surfaces of a comet flying across our solar system.

The drawings and the laboratory equipments are personal objects of a scientist/inventor/ researcher whom I inhabit while making the work. I consider myself a chronicler of his journeys through the past and future.