The vermilion powder is thick all along her centre parting, the kumkum bindi large on her forehead, her fingers drenched in alta , the maroon sari hugging her frame like a shroud. The red is interrupted only by metallic accents — piercings in her upper lip and chin, a double gold band on the bridge of her nose, long strings of heavy temple jewellery in her ears. A kolam grid, also in metal, emerges on her onyx-like chest as her feline eyes open to reveal the green of, and a certain lifelessness in, her pupils.
The woman stands in a gently flowing stream, but as one absorbs the details of this artwork, titled The Wife , that eerie sensation is inescapable, that of hovering on the edge of the ‘uncanny valley’. The Wife “You can’t get too emotional with 3D or CGI work, it is always a bit stiff,” explains Samyukta Madhu, the Chennai-born digital artist based out of Berlin who has created The Wife among a series of virtual models — using 3D and CGI softwares — as part of her latest series Reincarnations: Ghosts of a South Asian Past . Madhu, 29, was struck by the jewellery she saw in colonial-era photographs of women from Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, that she came across a year ago while surfing the Internet.
It also made her wonder how notions of beauty might have been different “had westernisation and colonisation not wiped out so much of our culture”. Samyukta Madhu “The women in this series look really beautiful but there’s also a sense that they are not h.