A Journey to the World of Shadows

From November 24, 2004 to January 30, 2005 – Museu del Cinema / Sala exposicions de 'la Caixa'

Tulsidas' "Ramayana"

With over 18,000 verses, the Ramayana is one of the great oriental epic poems, whose origins probably date back to between 1500 and 600 BC. Like the great epic it is, it has been represented over time in a multitude of formats and media: books, stories, painting, theatre, cinema, television, sculptures, comics, and so on. The shadow theatre is one of the media that has the longest tradition in the representation of the Ramayana. These shows are still put on very successfully today in India and different countries of the Far East. We can describe them as being somewhere between visual spectacle, popular tradition and liturgical act.
The Museum of Cinema's exhibition, which complements the exhibition that is offered at the same time in La Caixa's Exhibitions Room, tells the story of the Ramayana, by the poet Tulsidas, through 35 late nineteenth-century woodcuts from Bengal, exceptional for their rarity and quality. This show is supplemented with two interactive sections. The first, a large screen placed in the centre of the room, will allow visitors to handle oriental shadow figures. And finally, a last section, entitled "The Ramayana Today", presents us with an interactive space to discover the survival of this epic in different forms of plastic and audio-visual expression.