ABOUT | SAVINDER BUAL

My overall practice is driven by my fascination with the illusory qualities inherent in cinema and early animation. Imagining myself as a cinema pioneer I explore the interplay between the moving and the still, creating works that sit between the pre-cinematic and the digital.

By discovering low-fi ways to add movement to single images and commonplace objects/materials, my intent is to ignite an element of wonder at the illusion of cinema, giving the everyday enough of a twist to allow the imagination to run free.

We live in a society where the material is being replaced by the immaterial. This has drawn me to use tangible everyday materials in my work that I juxtapose with the relative immateriality of video. Behind the scenes of my videos there are various hand-crafted mechanisms that drive them that are hand-operated/cranked.

In recent years I have made kinetic works for audience interaction that have been shown internationally including Turner Contemporary, Margate, U.K, 1shanthiroad, Bangalore, India and Basement 6, Shanghai, China.

I have imagined for a long time that I am a cinema pioneer to the point that I have become one. I am a cinema pioneer.

My practice makes reference to engineering advancements and mechanical inventions from the 18th and 19th centuries, when a yearning for scientific discovery and a curiosity about the world helped fuel and justify colonial expansion.

This period was inextricably linked to new ways of seeing, attempts to control the seas and the 24 hour clock replacing the sun as a marker of time.

My work although often playful, requests the viewer to look closely in-between the gaps.