Pallavi Agarwala

In partnership with TAIS, the Toronto Animated Image Society

We are pleased to announce that Pallavi Agarwala will be coming to Toronto for an International Artist Residency, presented in collaboration with TAIS. For this residency, Pallavi will present animation as performance and create an immersive narrative experience using scaled up projections. The idea borrows from the language of videogames, and the animation is set up as a mise-en-scène with a first-person the point of view (POV). Seen from the perspective of political refugees  making journeys of migration, the narrative will oscillate between two worlds: the home they left behind and the new home they envision on the horizon. Responding to documentation of experiences of recent immigrants to Canada as part of the development of an empathetically-grounded work, Agarwala will use her time in studio at TAIS to 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.

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.

pallavi-agarwala.com