Gallery BMB presents Prasad Raghavan's ‘Shot Tilt’

The first solo show of Delhi based artist, Prasad Raghavan takes place at Mumbai’s Gallery BMB. His interest in cinema and posters helped him to think more about creating a set of works, which subscribed to the form of film posters but deflected the narratives to a new zone of meanings. In those works Prasad was focusing on the very ‘idea’ of posters that combine image and text in order to encapsulate the essence of a larger narrative.

‘Shot-Tilt’ is presenting a set of works that explain the personal aesthetic philosophy of Prasad Raghavan. He borrows the title from cinematic terminology. In a tilt shot, what a director does is to change the angle of perception from the conventional. With a tilt in the camera and angle of recording, the director can see the things in a new light/reality. Prasad plays both in the mundane and the transcended. Interestingly, when he titles his exhibition, he even tilts the norm of the cinematic jargon; instead of calling it a ‘Tilt Shot’, he calls it, ‘Shot-Tilt’.

In his works Prasad Raghavan debates the idea of desire and false promises. “We live in a society that constantly generates desire amongst the human beings. We are made into consuming subjects. There are a lot of false promises around us, which make us voracious consumers. The result is garbage and guilt. My idea in these works is to analyze and understand desire and false promises through the creation of ‘false icons’ and the images of garbage, sin and guilt,” he states.

Considering the artist’s interest in world cinema, and in the ethical and aesthetical foundational structures laid out by the universal philosophy embedded in the Bible, his works should be seen as the proclamations of an independent enquirer who makes ‘Christian religious allegory as a secular process of sociological inquiry into man's greed and ultimately annihilistic relationship with nature’.