Preeti Chandrakant
Preeti Chandrakant (Hindi: प्रीती चंद्रकांत) is a Mumbai-born, Zürich-based artist. She refers to herself as a first generation Immaterialist.
She is the first artist worldwide to create and show, ArtBeings - humans who have been sculpted by her over many years, and programmed with Time Pieces - that can be purchased, packaged, insured, displayed, resold and auctioned.
Chandrakant's work explores the interrelationship between experience and transformation. Her training in film and ethnology play a cardinal role in her pioneering, futuristic, artistic practice which takes the form of ArtBeings, Time Pieces and Time Capsules.
Her work has been shown at the Art Basel, the Palais Palffy in Vienna, the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, the Locarno International Film Festival, the Trento International Film Festival, the Festival Max Ophüls Preis, and the Mumbai International Film Festival among others.
Preeti Chandrakant's father was a Time–Life photographer in the 1960s. Her mother, Kamala Chandrakant, was an editor and writer of India's mythological comics Amar Chitra Katha, which have sold over ninety million copies worldwide.
Self trained in art, she took her early lessons from the likes of Achille Bonito Oliva, Brion Gysin, Meret Oppenheim and Robert Mapplethorpe. Throughout her artistic career, Chandrakant has used different names, like Preeti von Roma, Kali, or Preeti C. Kant, in order to delink her identity from her work.
In 1987, Chandrakant crossed paths with Swiss author Romano 'Roma' Fasciati who had grown up in the alpine village of Stampa, home to the family of Alberto Giacometti. Jointly they embarked on what was to be a fourteen-year-long precise investigation of human consciousness, which culminated in 2001. Chandrakant calls the works of this period Outer Journeys, Inner Odysseys.
A Goat To The Gods (as Preeti von Roma) is a video collage of behind-the-scenes 'found objects' with Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog, which depicts "an absurd journey into a jungle of veiled madness" revealing the 'doings' of Kinski and Herzog against the backdrop of real Africa. A Goat To The Gods premiered at the Palais Pallfy in Vienna.
Al Gatun, (as Kali) is a black and white feature film, (with the mesmerizing cinematography of Werner Herzog trained cameramen Rainer Klausmann and Beat Presser and the magical music of Popul Vuh) describing "a journey from the real to the surreal", shot with Roma and the people of his village, Stampa. Chandrakant won an award from the Federal office of Culture of the Swiss Confederation as well as the extremely rare special prize of the jury (headed by Karin Brandauer) for a film d'auteur, at the Trento International Film Festival. Al Gatun premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival and the Festival Max Ophüls Preis. In a 1991 review The Neue Zürcher Zeitung described the film as "simply fascinating".
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