Artist Afra Shafik transforms the history of Soviet-Indian cultural exchange into a video game. The Garage Museum features two of her video games: «I Don’t Know What» and «The Bride Who Couldn’t Stop Crying.»
For them, the artist explored Soviet book publishing in the languages of the Indian subcontinent and how translated fairy tales and popular science books became part of the childhoods of several generations of Indian readers.
Baba Yaga, the Empty Matryoshka, and the Indian girl Katya are the protagonists of a video game by Indian artist Afra Shafiq. In «I Don’t Know What,» the player roams a fantastical universe, seeking clues and weaving the narrative through their encounters and discoveries. The game is based on books that were translated into Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu in India during the 1960s–1980s. Shafiq spent several years studying this archive and transformed it into a strange, slightly surreal quest.
The second game is «The Bride Who Couldn’t Stop Crying.» The main character is a bride weeping on her wedding day; the player interacts with other women, and their choices determine how her story concludes. While the game superficially resembles old computer quests, instead of the familiar pixelated aesthetic, it incorporates a motif of red-and-white embroidery connected to the tradition of dowries.
Shafik operates at an intriguing intersection of things usually kept separate: Soviet book illustration, Indian experience, folk craft, and video games. As a result, familiar fairy-tale imagery begins to look slightly strange—and it is in this very moment that it becomes visible how the same story can exist in completely different ways across various cultures.
