Nihaal Faizel

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Explorations will engage with three popular children’s television shows from the latter part of the 1990s as cultural documents in media that traces shifts in our lives in the India of the post-liberalisation era. Nihaal Faizel is the Coordinator for this project.

Nihaal has a Bachelor’s degree in Creative and Applied Computation from the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore. He has several solo and group exhibitions as well as curatorial projects to his credit. He has been a resident artist at ZK/U in Berlin and at 1Shanthiroad Studio/ Gallery in Bangalore. He has also been the recipient of grants from Experimenter, Akar Prakar Contemporary and the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation. As an artist, his work responds to themes of the copy, replica, remake, gadget, and gimmick, often reflecting on media documents from popular and cultural memory. Given his experience he is best placed to be the Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

Over the last couple of years, Nihaal’s primary area of research has been the television shows that he grew up watching in the India of the post-liberalisation era. These include shows such as Shaktimaan (1997-2005), Shaka Laka Boom Boom (2002-2004), and Karishma Ka Karishma (2003-2004) which were aired on Doordarshan and emerging TV channels of that time like Star Plus. Shaktimaan was a pastiche of various popular American superheroes, Indianised through yoga, meditation and Hindu spiritualism, with a good measure of newly available computer graphics; Shaka Laka Boom Boom was the story of a boy with a magic pencil, which gave life to anything it drew; and Karishma Ka Karishma was a remake of an American show called Small Wonders, where a robot in the form of a small girl becomes part of her scientist-creator’s family, solving their everyday problems. All three shows were aimed at children, and they introduced and promoted technological tools as devices, characters or special effects.

Engaging with these shows as cultural documents reveal shifts in conditions, ideologies and propositions that mark the beginnings of post-liberalisation India, Nihaal says. These shows indexed the rapid transformation of technologies of representation, and captured ideas of urbanity, the family, technology and neo-liberal capitalism - all of which have transformed our lives and the way we engage with the world. At the same time these shows also took part in the expanding network and market of television distribution and product merchandising.

This project will create material experiments that will give form to the research Nihaal is doing in this area. A series of drawings using the magic slate as a surface, support and interface will be produced as part of an ongoing series titled The Magic Pencil. For its evocation of a gimmick-like magic, trace-like function, and occupying the liminal space between appearance and disappearance, the magic slate is an important and essential tool for this body of work. The project will also engage with the commercial merchandise from these shows along with a wide range of other children’s toys in a sculptural and object-oriented manner.

The outcome of the project will be this series of drawings on the magic slate. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be a documentation of the drawings.

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme in the manner in which it attempts to reflect on the processes of urbanisation, globalisation and representation in neo liberal India on a simple childhood toy such as a magic slate, exploring both form and content.

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is made possible with support from Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund.