Join Senior Curator Divia Patel and Senior Conservator Laura Ledwina as they introduce us to a very large and eye-catching object – a hand-painted, billboard-sized poster for the famous Bollywood film, 'Devdas' (2002).
Large film hoardings have historically been very important in Indian cinema, being seen along major roadsides and above the cinema itself. However hand-painted hoardings are used much less frequently today, making objects like this rare and quite special.
At over two metres high and five-and-a-half metres long, the enormous poster has been taken out of storage and needs to be unrolled and stretched. This will ensure that it is smooth and free from wrinkles before going on display at Young V&A.
Follow Laura in the Painting Conservation Studio as she adds strip lining to the canvas edges of the poster, so that it is secure and strong enough to be firmly pulled on a stretcher. In this meticulous process she carefully removes individual threads from new linen strips to create a fringe, cuts them to size, painstakingly chamfers the edges with a razor blade, and applies strong adhesive to hold this in place.
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