Gayatri Kodikal

Gayatri Kodikal is an artist, filmmaker, and game designer whose practice moves across film, video, installation, performance, and interactive media. Based between India and the Netherlands, her work explores the entanglements of memory, myth, history, and politics through narrative experimentation and hybrid forms.

Kodikal is known for creating immersive worlds that bring together archival research, speculative fiction, and playful interactivity. Her projects often reframe forgotten or suppressed histories, weaving together fragments of the real and the imagined to question how narratives of power are constructed and remembered. Working with filmic language as well as game engines, she blurs the boundary between spectator and participant—inviting audiences into layered environments where stories unfold across multiple temporalities.

Her critically acclaimed works include The Travelling Hand (2017), a feature-length experimental film tracing the story of a disembodied hand through historical and mythological terrains, and The Travelling Hand 2.0: A Game of Shifting Mirrors (2020), an interactive video game installation that extends the narrative into a playable world. These works exemplify her interest in how moving images and game mechanics can be used to unearth silenced voices and reimagine collective memory.

Kodikal’s work has been exhibited and screened internationally at venues such as the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam, and other art and film festivals. Through her multidisciplinary practice, she continues to explore how personal and collective histories can be re-scripted in the face of erasure—using play, performance, and moving image as tools of resistance and reimagination.