Past Events

delightful, virtual experience

Online Event

RRV invitation

April 29 is always a special day at The Raja Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation as it marks the great artist’s birth anniversary. Locked in and locked out doesn’t mean the Foundation’s work stops; on the contrary, it just provided an impetus to the Trustees to look for different avenues to find the way forward.

What until now has been a live event with packed auditoriums turned into a virtual delight on April 29, 2020 as the Foundation hosted a fantastic, virtual experience on Zoom while navigating the participants through their digital platform on Google Arts and Culture.

Spread over two sessions in the morning (11am-1pm), primarily for the Indian and Middle East audience and in the night (9pm-11pm) for Europe, US and Canada viewers, it was a delightful experience for us and the participants.

CEO and Managing Trustee Gitanjali Maini welcomed the viewers with a crisp note thanking them for turning up and tuning in, in these days of enforced closures before launching the Foundation’s two, new cherished archive modules to commemorate Ravi Varma’s 172nd birth anniversary.

To make it thoroughly enriching the Foundation brought on board distinguished academicians, scholars and guest speakers from several parts of the globe for the two sessions. Emeritus Professor Robin Jeffrey from Melbourne, Emeritus Professor and reputed author Partha Mitter from Oxford, Prof. Richard Davis from New York all joined in along with writer and historian Rupika Chawla, one of the most established authority on Ravi Varma and his art.

Some of our new associates – art collectors Mark Baron and Elise Boisante from New York, whose book Gods in Print is highly popular as well as Ekaterina Stolyarova from the State Museum of the History of Religion in St. Petersburg, Russia also logged in for the night session.

Wanderers Between Worlds, an artefact by film-maker Vikas Urs, which traces the story of the Ravi Varma press, was released with a lively conversation between Vikas and Archana Shenoy keeping the viewers engrossed.

Launching 10 new exhibits on the Google Arts and Culture platform, we took the viewers through a unique experience bringing the art to their homes/workplaces or wherever they had tuned in from.

Following this, the Foundation released The World of Raja Ravi Varma: Princes & Patrons, an exclusive research material authored by the popular young writer Manu S. Pillai. Manu kept the audience enthralled taking them through the book in his own, inimitable way interspersing the stories with never before heard anecdotes.

The Q&A session with both Vikas and Manu was highly inter-active and thoroughly enjoyable as the Foundation seamlessly conducted the event and delivered what it promised – a unique virtual experience. Notes, mails and congratulatory messages from the viewers who had signed in globally for this event ensured the Foundation’s ideals of spreading Ravi Varma’s legacy would continue unhindered, no matter the difficult times that we are locked in.

Click here to view invitation.

Press releases:

Event Photos

Wanderers Between Worlds

Previews





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