This project was created in response to an Open Call by Tate Museums and Galleries UK, inviting young artists aged 16-25 to respond to iconic works of art in their own collection. These inspired works would be displayed alongside the original, on billboards across London through August 2020, in an effort to make art more accessible and inspire viewers to rethink history by presenting classical works alongside more contemporary interpretations of their themes. Furthermore, the project hoped to inspire a message of hope and creativity during the global pandemic. 

Our photographic response to the 1850 oil painting 'Ophelia' by Sir John Everett Milais was selected from over 800 entries worldwide, and displayed on Royal College Street in Camden, London.

Millais’s painting depicts Shakespeare’s heroine as a tragic but serene figure. Ophelia’s melancholy grace has captured people’s imagination across time, and across geographic boundaries. In India, Shakespeare’s plays are still widely taught and revered, perhaps a remainder of our colonized past. 

We reimagine Ophelia in the context of our own culture, and the contemporary issues we see around us. In Hindu mythology as well as indigenous cultures of India, water bodies are often personified as feminine forms. We have stories of river goddesses and maidens born of water. From an ecological point of view, this personification nurtures empathy and a creative relationship with these ‘bodies’, rather than a destructive one. Today, our water bodies are being choked by plastic waste and poisoned by toxic chemical effluents from industries. With our project, we embody the death of Ophelia, as a visual metaphor for a dying river.