On the Artwork Home in Mumbai’s Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, the serpent lingered all over the place, in metallic, delusion, and light-weight, as Serpenti Infinito opened its doorways. Bvlgari’s first large-scale cultural exhibition in India is the third chapter in a worldwide journey that has wound its manner from Shanghai and Seoul to Mumbai.
Curated by Nature Morte and envisioned by Sean Anderson, the exhibition gathered twenty-three Indian and worldwide artists to reimagine the nāga (the serpent) as a residing cosmology. Anderson’s curatorial intelligence formed the present as a residing archive, a dialog that by no means concludes. His strategy insisted on trade: artwork talking with artwork, artists with viewers, delusion with materials. Nothing in Serpenti Infinito was nonetheless. Its construction pulsed with dialogue; labour, indigeneity, and transformation intertwined just like the serpent’s personal physique.
(Picture credit score: Bvlgari)
Serpenti Infinito revolves round cycles of creation, shedding, and renewal. Throughout three chapters – Crafting Serpents in Historical past, A Mythic Presence, and Infinite Transformations – the exhibition traces how the serpent’s picture and thought have coiled throughout millennia, carrying with it the knowledge of metamorphosis.
The lineage started in Rome. As Jean-Christophe Babin, Bvlgari’s CEO, reminded the viewers, Rome is just not merely the place Bvlgari was based, it’s the maison’s first muse. ‘Its structure, grandeur, and color gave us a boldness,’ he says. ‘The place others made luxurious delicate, just like the French, Rome made it monumental.’ The distinction is telling. French minimalism prized subtlety and singularity: white diamonds, one metallic, one line. Roman design, in Bvlgari’s palms, turned an act of aesthetic fearlessness; colored stones, voluptuous kind, gold that gleams like daylight on ruins.
It was Cleopatra, Babin recalled, who as soon as wore a serpent-shaped bracelet upon her arrival in Rome, an object that was each decoration and proclamation, magnificence was sovereignty. For Bvlgari, that delusion endures. ‘Just like the snake shedding its pores and skin,’ Babin says, ‘jewelry lets you develop into one other model of your self, not another person, however somebody latent inside you.’
If Rome birthed Bvlgari’s language of audacity, Asia now extends it. The yr started in Tokyo with Kaleidos: Colours, Cultures and Crafts on the Nationwide Artwork Middle, a collaboration with SANAA and Formafantasma. Japan, with its deep aesthetic traditions of wabi-sabi, shibui, and restraint, provided a really completely different stage. SANAA’s translucent structure turned color into ambiance, with mild subtle by means of veils of glass and silk, the place edges disappeared and hues breathed. Formafantasma’s interventions mapped gemstone tonality onto glass and resin, exhibiting how color itself may develop into an act of contemplation. Kaleidos embodied a Japanese ethos: magnificence as stability, precision, and continuity. Restrained, embodying stability amid flux.
(Picture credit score: Bvlgari)
In Mumbai, that quiet chromatic poise reworked into mythic motion. Right here, the serpent turned the central metaphor; fluid but grounded, ceaselessly in movement however anchored in essence.
Chapter I: Crafting Serpents in Historical past opens with Bvlgari’s Tubogas watches of the Nineteen Forties and the five-coil Pallini bracelet of 1955, displayed alongside Indian manuscripts and ritual objects the Sapta Nadi Tantric Textual content, the Nag-yash Yantra, and Bhuta Theyyam breastplates. These artifacts, tracing the serpent as image of power, water, and rebirth, revealed a shared perception between Roman artisans and Indian cosmologies, right here decoration is a vessel of life power.
Close by, R. Srinivasan and L. Rathakrishnan’s 108 Karanas of Natyashastra translated that life power into movement. Impressed by Shiva Nataraja, the god who dances the universe into being, the serpent a companion in rhythm. Shiva, the indigenous god of paradox, each masculine and female, protector and destroyer, dances with serpents coiled round his neck. His movement sustains the world, his stillness dissolves it. The serpent right here is continuation, a logo of boundless power and metamorphosis.
Chapter II: A Mythic Presence wove the serpent’s afterlives by means of up to date artwork. Bharti Kher’s Medusa, a resin-cast feminine determine cloaked in saris, her pores and skin coated with a whole bunch of snake-shaped bindis, embodied the stress between worry and divinity, female and monstrous. Ritika Service provider’s triptych Zoomorph II, with Gaia encircled by a cosmic serpent, summoned a pre-rational realizing, a mythic intelligence that transcends comprehension. Padma Shri Baua Devi’s Bal Basant (2005), painted within the bharni model of Mithila, reworked the serpent into witness: a mediator of fertility, tenderness, and domesticity. Her eco-critical vocabulary framed the snake as kin, its presence a grammar of coexistence, in distinction to non-indigenous recognitions of the naga as a menace, worshipped with reverence laced with worry.
(Picture credit score: Bvlgari)
Chapter III: Infinite Transformations turned from delusion to expertise. Refik Anadol’s Infinito, a 360° mirrored chamber, immersed viewers in data-driven waves of serpentine mild. Enter Tasks’ Rattan Snake reimagined the serpent as woven structure, rattan looping like breath, blurring craft and computation. Harshit Agrawal’s VR set up reworked the viewer into serpent, transferring by means of digital terrain that mirrored each need and decay. These works gestured towards the identical fact: that the serpent, like expertise, is ceaselessly reinventing its pores and skin.
Even the jewelry echoed that rhythm. The Serpenti Maharani Secret Necklace, the Apsaras, Ananta Shesha, and Jaipur Mirage revealed craftsmanship as choreography: every hyperlink articulated by hand, every be part of invisible, each hidden floor as beautiful as what the world sees. Turned the other way up, the jewels remained excellent. The aspect that touches pores and skin is handled with equal reverence, embodying mechanics and precision in its joinery and making the tactility of the objects simply as fascinating as their splendour to the attention. Their modular varieties – heads detaching, coils reshaping – captured metamorphosis in materials kind.
(Picture credit score: Bvlgari)
Priyanka Chopra Jonas, who inaugurated the exhibition, calls Bvlgari ‘provocative.’ To impress, for Bvlgari, is to awaken and to unsettle the smoothness of luxurious.
Between Tokyo and Mumbai, between color and serpent, Bvlgari staged a cultural experiment: to deal with magnificence as cosmology moderately than commodity. SANAA’s translucent restraint and Anderson’s sensorial density could appear worlds aside, but each articulate the identical instinct – that magnificence, at its boldest, thinks.
As I left Infinito, reflections multiplied endlessly; mild, metallic, physique, serpent, every fragment looping again into one other. In that mirrored continuum, Bvlgari’s world is now not spectacle, however system, an argument for transformation as our most historical, and most trendy, intuition.
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