ALKA HINGORANI  
   
Work Area:
Film, Photography and Story-telling - adaptations
across media, Architecture and design (Research
interest in Biomimicry), Aesthetics, art criticism
and appreciation, Visual Narratives		 E : alka@iitb.ac.in
W : www.idc.iitb.ac.in/alka
   
Making Faces - Self and Image Creation
in a Himalayan Valley
Publisher: University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, USA, September 2012.
   
This book tells the story of god-makers and of the gods they make. Taberam Soni, Labh Singh, Amar Singh and other artists live and work in the hill-villages of the lower Himalayas (at six- to ten-thousand feet above sea level), in the Kullu district of Himachal Pradesh. They fashion faceimages of deities (mohras) out of thin sheets of precious metal, making objects that are cultural embodiments of kinship, both divine and earthly: god and gold at once. As they make these objects, they also dance a gentle dance across caste boundaries in a part of India where caste differences still determine rules of contact and correspondence, proximity and association. The artist who makes the object is not permitted to touch it once it is completed and consecrated, not allowed to enter the temple where it will abide. Yet, he is sovereign during the

process of the making of these gods. Artist and object are the two protagonists of this tale. The process of the making of one also makes the other, the creation of the face-image of a deity offering space and context for the articulation of the shifting, sliding identity of the artist.

There are two questions this book attempts to answer:
1. Can a religious object truly be an object of art? Can and does it lend itself to critique and appreciation in ways that are not inflected by religious ardour?

2. How does the artist mobilize the oscillation of power and status between self and image during the making of the image? To what end, and in what ways does his vocation assist the process?
 
Still Photographer
Fired-earth housing, Pondicherry  
   

I was the still-photographer for a fired-earth housing project where a cluster of three catenary domes was built using coal-dust infused clay for bricks, and involved lighting up the entire structure as a kiln to stabilize it and make it weather resistant. The hearth or interior of the catenary structure was filled with unfired bricks of the same kind as made the structure, so that a single firing could also generate building materials.

The technology was first tested by Ray Meeker, Architect, Potter, Ceramic artist, from Pondicherry, India, who has built

 several buildings over the years perfecting both material and process. This particular project was an attempt to understand and record carefully both exigencies of replication and economies of scale. It was also intended as an international student workshop under the tutelage of Dr. Anupama Kundoo, architect, who was then teaching at TU, Berlin (now in Madrid). A book on the process and history of earth-friendly, economically sustainable design with this as an example is a work in progress.