by Pramodha Weerasekera
In his latest publication The Magic Pencil (2025), Nihaal Faizal returns to technological imaginaries, with particular emphasis on the interfaces that represent the turn of the millennium. In 24 reused, out-of-production TOMY® Megasketcher Classics, Faizal recreates Sanju’s adventures, the main character from the early 2000s Indian television show Shaka Laka Boom Boom. A list of objects and actions that Sanju, Jhumroo, Karan, Raj, and many of his friends draw accompanies the drawings, with the text being part and parcel of the enchantment of the magic pencil’s technology. These magnetic drawings, lists, objects, and brands like Cadbury, Britannia, Maruti Suzukis, and Tata Indicas are etched in the memories of many South Asian millennials, much like Faizal, who grew up watching such shows. However, this consumer and capitalist imaginaries integrated into the lives of many children were directly affected by an economic downturn in India at the time, where the World Bank’s support was needed to alleviate the situation. Many from middle-class families, who grew up imagining that education, money and success correlate, felt this, as jobs did not live up to the salary and benefit standards they expected. Commodity prices fluctuated, rendering parents unable to provide their children with technological novelties that had entered the open market economy.
Still from episode 1 of Shaka Laka Boom Boom, written and directed by Vijay Krishna Acharya, 2000
Faizal deliberates on the interface, both literally and figuratively, in response to the millennial disappointment associated with the capitalist imaginary. A return to the word ‘interface’ reveals that it originally referred to a tangible or intangible boundary of multiple bodies, spaces, or phases. Faizal’s practice interacts with the interface in its original meaning anew, without the possibility of erasure or removal. In each Megasketcher, three intangible boundaries of screen-based technologies interact with each other. The television, which predated the computer, is his entry point: Sanju was able to revive anything he would draw using a magic pencil. The interface here is still tangible, yet the ‘system’ beyond the interface of the TV screen is magical, moving into the realm of science fiction. It is also significant that Faizal presents this work in 2025, an age of Artificial Intelligence and virtual reality where the interface is blurry and intangible, with robots and AI influencers deeply integrated in the daily lives of human beings.
The screen of the reclaimed TOMY Megasketcher Classic on which Faizal draws with a permanence that the original lacks is significant. The interfaces and layers within the publication and exhibition do not merely reenact Sanju’s adventures. They comprise a culturally and historically situated depiction of what Alfred Gell terms as art as a “technical system.” They highlight “the power that technical processes have of casting a spell over us so that we see the real world in an enchanted form,” as Gell suggests.
Installation view, Nihaal Faizal, “The Magic Pencil” at 44 Great Russell Street, London, 2025. Courtesy of the artist, Ben Broome and Olamiju Fajemisin. Photo: Jorge Stride
The artist’s strength in this process lies in the use of the form of the publication and the reclaimed TOMY® Megasketcher Classics, which are both ephemeral and nostalgia-inducing.
Still, Nihaal Faizal, Mohammed Rafi Fan Blog, Video, 31:02, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.
The recent The Magic Pencil series questions the inordinate power we often accord to nostalgia as a sentiment of wanting to remember our version of experiences, which often overwrites truth (if, for a moment, we assume that there exists an objective truth). While Faizal recreates some objects for us visually in the megasketchers, the rest is left for our imagination through the notecards—to recreate the motifs from memory. Faizal’s deliberate play with the permanence of his medium takes us back to his interest in the ‘gimmick’ and how megasketchers and Sanju’s magic pencil enchanted us as children: they remain permanently etched in our memories as magical objects of desire. The gimmick here becomes a trick of capitalist desire meant to entice children, who, in this case, are entering a world defined by digital technologies. Ben Broome and Olamiju Fajemisin, who curated this body of work in London speak of this phenomenon in this context as “the restorative promise of erasure.” This promise ensures that after a moment is recorded, it can be erased and changed to suit other narratives; the ‘restorative’ power remains to be questioned, as newer narratives may be borne out of convenience as opposed to accuracy. The works signal that this is yet another promise that remains unfulfilled.
Nihaal Faizal, The Magic Pencil (Skull with Bones), 2020/2025, “The Magic Pencil” at 44 Great Russell Street, London, 2025. Courtesy: the artist, Ben Broome and Olamiju Fajemisin. Photo: Jorge Stride
Faizal’s works have often involved simultaneously looking back as well as forward in relation to technology, in an attempt to make one re-examine their relationship with it having become an inextricable part of human existence.
This recent engagement The Magic Pencil thus activates our memory and engages our critical thinking about what social, cultural, political, and economic elements surrounded us in the 1990s and early 2000s as the age of Information Technology in South Asia.
About the Author
Pramodha Weerasekera is an art writer and curator based in Sri Lanka. Her writing and curatorial interests merge gender, emotion, and feminist ways of life, artmaking, and bookmaking in South Asia. Her writing has appeared in e-flux, Art Review, Hyperallergic, BOMB, Frieze, Momus, and more.
www.pramodhaweerasekera.com
This issue of Purée Mag was made possible through the support of the Generator Cooperative Art Production, 2025-26.