International Artist in Residence

Pallavi Agarwala

TAIS’ 2017 International Artist in Residence

Presented in collaboration with SAVAC

In partnership with The Theatre Centre

Pallavi Agarwala is an illustrator and animator from New Delhi, India. After working as a graphic designer and freelance illustrator in India, she completed her Masters at the Royal College of Art (London, UK) on the Commonwealth Shared Scholarship in 2016. Agarwala’s work draws upon the poetic language of animated documentaries as means to reconstruct narratives. With a focus on the lives of people in modern cities, she is interested in addressing and representing the underrepresented in her work. Using experimental techniques in drawing, film, and collage ‘cut-ups’ to visually construct metaphors regarding disruption and change, Agarwala believes in approaching subjects with humour and plurality. Considering this as vital to her process and to her efforts to represent the notion of the ‘other’ she is also interested in thinking about the future of cites and how this theme of difference is experienced within urban environments.

www.pallavi-agarwala.com

Plans for the Residency:

For Agarwala’s new work, to be developed in studio at TAIS, she will draw from the narratives of migration by political refugees. Agarwala will respond to documentation of experiences of recent immigrants to Canada as part of the development of an empathetically-grounded work. Agarwala’s piece will focus on the creation of an immersive stop motion short animated film presenting metaphoric landscapes. Her subject will be the sensory experience of transition, and the feelings that accompany displacement when structures of shelter (homes and communities) and their attendant relationships are threatened or untethered. The film will be narrative-based, and will be presented using large-scale digital projections. Borrowing from the story-telling style of video games, the animation will be set up as a mise-en-scene with a first-person point of view, from the perspective of people in the midst of a journey of migration. The narrative will oscillate between two worlds: the home they left and the home they envision on the horizon.