Artist rewinds clock to golden age of VHS in Wolverhampton art installation
Nostalgia and the world of the early video rental shops is the focus of an art display in Wolverhampton's Mander Centre.
It is the latest installation created by award-winning artist and producer Dawinder Bansal featuring the recreation of a 1980s living room and the story of her family's VHS enterprise based in Harrow Street, Whitmore Reans.
Her late father Avtar Singh Bansal carried out a roaring trade at the time to fill a gap in the market by supplying Bollywood films which were lapped up by the area's south Asian community due to the absence of culturally relevant programmes on mainstream television.
The exhibition, featuring a recreated 1980s living room, a 10-minute film, and a huge poster display, is currently on the ground floor in the centre near the Victoria Street entrance.
Featuring red patterned wallpaper and a three-piece suite it is part of the British Art Show 9 Offsite programme.
Dawinder, 44, a Royal Society of Arts fellow, recalls that in 1984 the licensing authorities caught up with her father and he was prosecuted.
Sadly following her father’s sudden death, aged 48, in 1988, the family shop, Bansal Electrics, closed down and most of the original VHS tapes, film posters, fixtures and fittings were put in storage.
"It's created quite a lot of interest. People have come in and sat down and due to listening to my story have opened up and shared theirs," said Dawinder.
"This living room signifies a friendly space. It also celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit of small businesses that was exciting in some pockets of the community and at that time was so essential for south Asians."
The display will run until April 10 before being recreated in Birmingham for the Commonwealth Games.
She is also appealing for anyone who may have photographs of the front of her father's shop when it was up and running in the 1980s to make contact.
Her Sikh parents met and married in India before emigrating to Kenya and then moving to Britain in the 1960s where her father at first worked for British Steel. He set up the shop after being made redundant in 1977.
