Pop art meets pop culture: A semiotic reading of Bephen Bahana’s The Curry Bunch

Abstract

Inspired by Barthes’s analysis of a Paris Match cover image, our paper semiotically explores two oil-on-canvas images by New Zealand-born Indian artist Bephen Bahana. Within our exploration, we use constructs of denotation, connotation, myth and archetype to illuminate those images. Our research aim was to find the meaning behind the two portraits’ visual aesthetics. In doing so, we reveal Bahana’s images to be a visual shorthand signifying Indian history and the ways in which American media influence impacts notions of identity. Specifically, our insights reveal the ways in which many contemporary Indian people might ‘see themselves’. While our work concentrates upon Indian imagery, myth and archetype, those considerations have pan-cultural connections. In these ways, our paper links pop art to popular culture and, in doing so, raises questions about how the canon and hierarchy of art have come to reflect and reinforce wider sociocultural norms. Our paper offers a voice of resistance, in much the same style as Bahana’s images.