Siddharth Rawal’s ‘Artist Gum Ho Gaya’ Examines Creation, Intention & Vulnerability

From grief and friendship to loneliness and belonging, Siddharth Rawal’s visual diary is a collection of small cinematic montages that sit somewhere between poetry, philosophy and personal memory. Posting under the handle bojack_falseman, Rawal has slowly built a running archive of reflections about being human. His videos often linger on ordinary scenes—faces passing through a room, still moments in a city, fleeting gestures of everyday life—while long captions unfold into thoughtful meditations on existence. The images and writing sit together in a way that feels patient and contemplative, creating the sense that each reel is a short visual poem drawn from life itself.

That instinct for observation has now extended into a new project on YouTube called Artist Gum Ho Gaya, a video-journal series centred around the practice of painter Preeti. Siddharth explains that he was initially commissioned to photograph her paintings so they could be digitised for future exhibitions. During those sessions, long conversations began to grow naturally alongside the work. “As we kept talking about art, life and the politics of it all that leads and connects us to the act of creation and gives the label of art to things, experiences and what not, we unconsciously shared our common fear of being perceived and seen after creating something in the digital age,” he shares.

In the age of mechanical reproduction, Siddharth insists that intention becomes the litmus test to understand the difference between art and content, and this raises a question for him about artists who never really leave the cocoon of their process — “those who, even after finishing their work, still find themselves present, if not stuck, within the memories of their experiences and the expectations they carried while they were in that process,” as he puts it. He explains that, over time, his collaboration with Preeti reached a point where self-awareness began to dissipate, opening into a safe space where ideas could exist without any sense of future or hierarchy attached to them. In that state, they were fully present with their feelings, and with that intention, he picked up the camera and continued recording.

With three episodes in, Siddharth sees the ongoing series as something guided simply by instinct. He explains that with each attempt to create something deeply personal that also finds a shared ground with another artist — whether as an idea, a series, or a project imagined together — there is an inherent uncertainty about where that idea might lead. For him, the focus remains on staying connected to the instincts that initiated the act of creation, while being able to communicate, with complete honesty and vulnerability, the shifts and changes experienced within oneself and within the collaborator during the process of making those episodes. “So there's no timeline or schedule for the next episode,” he notes. “They will come out based on our relationship with each other.”

Follow Siddharth here and watch the series below:

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