Besides the fact that they are Bollywood superstars sharing one surname, Khan, they inspire rich images in film posters as well as the rarefied echelons of White-cube galleries. The latest take-off comes in the shape of Prantik Chattopadhyay's exhibit, Pehchan Kaun. It's a tongue-in-cheek, rip-tease on Bollywood and its stars: their illegal deals, their news scandals, their constant appropriation of jingoistic ideals and their cinematic hits and misses.

The exhibit just wound up at Sakshi Art Gallery, Cooperage, but the works are stills available at the venue for sale. Chattopadhyay's mixed media is a barrel of laugh and combines painting, wooden cut-outs of the stars and the format of a zany board game. The Baroda artiste has sourced kitsch objects like 3-D images of waterfalls and tiny plastic deer that find themselves intertwined in a steel scrubber that serves as Salman's innards.



“While I have always been interested in popular culture, for this show I decided to concentrate on Bollywood because I needed popular icons that all of India would recognize,” says the 28-year-old. “I was pleasantly surprised to see that even outside India, people were able to guess who the stars were.”

About the board game format, he says, “Like the cricketer cards collected by children, I made Bollywood star cards and decided to play a guessing game with viewers.” The works are also an exploration of the real versus the reel. “People may forget the myths but not the characters. I added my own touches here and there, like in the Aamir Khan work I hinted to a map of Gujarat with reference to the Fanaa fracas.”

There is also a sense of irony in his work since the actors appears as puppets. “Shah Rukh Khan is the Indian idol presiding over diversity in a film like Swades. Sunny Deol has been coloured with shades of saffron and he has willy-nilly become an 'Indian' supernatural character,” he says.