A bit about Janaki
What she does
Janaki Ranpura looks for truth through humor. She makes art in the form of plays, animations, street games, essays, talks, illustrations, and objects and works with allusive, rather than linear, narratives. Her work gets made through a process of applied research.
The Egg + Sperm :: Hide + Seek. A street game where people wearing sperm hats chase an enormous egg.
Your Heart Is In My Mouth. An installation where audiences read text through microscopes to piece together the mystery of where an immigrant doctor’s heart has disappeared to.
Ububu. A marionette show about power and the Power of Charisma.
It’s Not That Hard To Write A Book. A brightly-colored exhibit where everyone who enters becomes an author.
Where she's coming from
Janaki Ranpura has been designing performer / participant relationships for galleries, public spaces, and theaters for twenty years. She has been a fellow at the Minneapolis Playwrights’ Center, the MacDowell Colony, an AOV technology fellow, and a member of the City Art Collaboratory, Public Art St Paul’s city planning think tank. She has served on speaking and grant panels and given artist talks to many diverse communities.
She’s in the process of developing Your Heart Is In My Mouth, a toy theater performance about family history developed through Pillsbury House Theater and with installation components created while in residence at the MacDowell Colony. She was a 2010 Artists on the Verge art and technology fellow with Northern Lights MN. Ranpura has designed and led giant puppet parades in Taiwan, South Korea, and the United States. She has received awards from the Minnesota State Arts Board, Forecast Public Art, the Jerome Foundation, and a Citation of Excellence for her large-scale shadow theater piece Lovesick Sea Play. She worked on Baby Marx with Pedro Reyes at Art Basel Parcours and the Walker Art Center. She trained with Larry Reed’s company Shadowlight, at École Lecoq, and at Yale University.
What she's thinking about in 2016
She's thinking lately about perceptual constructions: how the world seems to us compared with what it might actually, objectively be. We crave a coherent immaterial perceptual narrative, and we will act as if it is stable and enduring rather than facing a reality which shifts and disintegrates as easily and regularly as beach sandcastles. Sometimes we avoid uncertain realities by making up stories that are very damaging. Janaki seeks, in her work, to make stories that help us feel comfortable with uncertainty.
Because we construct (or fictionalize) our perceptual coherence, reading novels offers many of the same ways of learning things as having actual new experiences. Art installations, too, train us for the future, permitting us to model how we might interact with emerging vistas. Playing with others is a way of constructing new worlds, too, this time à deux. We can also make fictional worlds with zero social limits, which we do: in our dreams. All of these forms enter the artist's work.
Currently influenced by Peter Mendelsund, Orhan Pamuk, Edmund de Waal, and paradoxical sleep.