Parinda Mai, like many of her generation in Thailand and Southeast Asia, grew up with the story Twelve Sisters communicated to in various forms from oral history to soap operas and cartoon animations.
The project 12 Kalpas Tales is the artist’s personal search and reinterpretation of the moral of this folktale, connecting its theme of blinding and destruction to the universal questions concerning humanity’s place in nature, relationship with technology and transcendence.
As a creative visionary, Parinda Mai re-imagines the Twelve Sisters story through a multi-part, multi-media project that consists of short films, video installations, projection mapping, site-specific installations, augmented reality, and digital imagery. This site is a documentation of this effort in the past 5 years.
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Kalpas (n.) a Sanskrit word used in the Buddhist cosmology to mean an abstract measurement of a very, very long time, such as the duration of the universe.
An excerpt from the Twelve Sisters film made in 1981. Viewable on YouTube.
And the Twelve Sisters story goes…
Once upon a time there was a couple, who wish to have children but couldn’t. They performed many rituals until one day they succeeded; they had 12 daughters. Their neighbors called them “twelve sisters.” Because of this many children, they became poor and decided to disown the 12 sisters. The couple left their children in the forest in a kingdom ruled by a prince. One day the prince saw the beautiful 12 sisters and fell in love. He married all of them. Later a yaksha found the prince and fell in love with him. She used her black magic to convince the prince to imprison the 12 sisters in the cave. The prince fell for it. The yaksha feigned sickness, telling the prince that the only cure there is is the eyeballs of the twelve sisters. The prince thus let her go into the cave to gouge the eyes of the twelve sisters out. The twelve sisters were also pregnant with the sons of the prince. Blinded, hungry, and stuck in the cave, they had no choice but to eat their own babies. Only the son of the youngest of the sisters, Ros, managed to escape the cave and the cannibalism. Ros who fled to another kingdom, grew up to be a strong, virtuous man, who would then later (in the subsequent episode) come back to rescue his mother and aunts who were left blind in the cave.