Amba Sanyal

Three stories about persons forced to think about the ethics and moral issues raised by medical advances.

Vishnu has a bleak future before him, he must join his father in the family's oil business and try and boost the sales of the stinking oil in small town India. He sees his chance to escape by offering to transport a ramshackle truck, with a make-shift cinema, to a distant museum that lies across the expansive desert of Kutch. His companions: a chai-wallah chokra, a gypsy girl and a burlesque mechanic.

"In this work, a library of books stands improbably in a clearing in the forest, symbolising ‘a library of knowledge.’ A lion enters, becoming the guardian of this knowledge but also, representing a mythical, other-worldly creature of the imaginary. The lion is driven away as the library is set on fire. Finally, a young lion returns to the city that emerges from the ashes of the scene. Flowers rise from the burnt ground. In this visionary and poetic video artwork the ‘hidden atrocities’ that take place in this animated painting are suggested rather than explained. It becomes a statement about a collective destruction of the environment, and of generational knowledge and wisdom passed through centuries and across cultures for which we must all atone."