CELESTIAL VAULT, 2017
August Fröhls (Swapnaa Tamhane & Aman Sandhu) in collaboration with Asha Puthli
 

This film is a visual collage of syncopated hand gestures (mudras) and vocal exercises by cult-figure Asha Puthli in response to a James Turrell sculpture. On a bitter cold, windy January day, we filmed Puthli at this artificial crater titled “Celestial Vault” along the North Sea. At the base of elliptical form, there is a stone bench (that somewhat resembles a tombstone) from which one can gaze at the expansive sky above, engaging in an awareness of observation.

 

Puthli’s vocal exercises build a continuum between the properties of light and sound; they also address mortality and the spiritual realm. She recalls a memory of a week-long fast and meditation in which she herself was on a brink, standing at the entrance of vault between the material and corporeal world.

 

Puthli was a diva: she was the first female singer from Mumbai to arrive in New York in the late 1960s to be singing in English, recording vocals on Ornette Coleman’s “Science Fiction” album (1972); and her first two albums, “Asha Puthli” (1973) and “The Devil is Loose” (1976) are oft-sampled in hip hop today demonstrating her continual relevance. Her history and legend has been overwritten because the industry and public have never known where to place her due to her cultural background, her gender, and because she crossed several genres of music from disco to pop to jazz. Now 72 years old, and facing her own mortality, this film is less a biographical account of this incredible legend, and is instead is a collaboration that delves into the spiritual realm, with one another artist responding to another. Towards the end of the film, she offers to lie down on the bench to look up to the awaiting sky.