We watch cinema evoked by a forlorn desire. For the beauty, allure, freedom, andornament that compel a stirring so profound, it spills over from generation to generation. For the faces, bodies, and impulses that contour our perception of artistry, romance, and teasing, become inseparable from the shared lexicon of community. For the extraordinary conditions enlivened from our ordinary every day, we watch cinema to escape from the trite quotidian.Maithili Chaturvedi’s debut solo show Dream Girl, confronts and teases the separation between subject and spectator—and indeed: object and voyeur—by rendering memorable: The Heroine on velvet.In a narrative culture besotted by the stories of men, the Hindi film heroine is its most complex figure. Tasked with embodying film beauty: a fluid, temporal space of desire and expression, designed to both evoke the hero’s yearning and our awe, personify the poeticism of the movie’s spoken and lyrical text, and aestheticize the movie’s musical pursuits, the Heroine is at once the subject of gaze, the object of fantasy, and the body of dancerly ingenuity. She is eternal, both insisted upon and reviled, the apotheosis of immaculate appeal and a warning for young girls watching.Dream Girl is a response to this paradox, an attempt to arrest time and space, and redraw our attention to singular moments of beauty, emotion, and tension. A pulsating Helen, a plaintive Meena Kumari, a wanting Parveen Babi, a defiant Madhubala, and a passionate Rekha are among the many resurrected and luxuriated on the surface of velvet. The medium here is the message: how velvet tantalizes a yearning of touch, but is also subject to judgements of gauche and inelegance. Much like the Hindi Film Heroine. The material’s distinctive sheen and collapsible depth shifts light into dark edges, while also betraying an undeniable sparkle. Again, much like the Hindi film heroine.In this glorious debut showcase, Maithili Chaturvedi offers a love letter cloaked with concern: can our gaze and fascination set us free? Can a work of visual appeal have textual power? Can the ordinary me ever become a Dream Girl?