Project

Galactica V.2 Dharma Garden
2023
Mixed media installation
Commissioned by ArtScience Museum, Singapore

The Hindu goddess Lakshmi is widely associated with fertility and prosperity. In some parts of Java and Bali, she is known as Dewi Sri and is worshipped for agriculture.

This works is imagine the goddess as an otherworldly being arriving in a spacecraft that appears in the form of a dharmic wheel. Accompanying the goddess, and part of the spacecraft are capsule-like terrariums. Filled with moss and other organic materials, these capsules are intended to trigger terra-formation – the process of modifying the environment of a planetary body to make it habitable.

The eight screens of the ‘dharmic wheel spacecraft’ extend out from the central capsule, rendering a graphical display of the system in operation. The artwork explicitly fuses Hindu philosophical motifs with the visual and thematic lexicon of science fiction.