Bombay Tilts Down
13m 14s looped, seven channel environment
2022
Six moves that begin in unstable skies and at sea, and descend “into the ordinary” via a vertical landscape filled with unfinished city landmarks, persistent settlements, details without end. A landscape movie in facets, filmed by remotely controlled CCTV camera from atop a 34-floor building in central Mumbai.
Each tilt downwards is made from dozens of repeated shots that show and hide themselves. They become a fluid movement across categories, structures and lines made on land, an interest of CAMP for many years. The stacked and layered city in Parel and Worli (old Bombay tidal islands, and later forming the working-class heart of the city) is suggestive of new subject and object formations.
When people appear in the images, many of them seem to be aware of this eye or hole in the sky. Everyone is, or can be an actor, in diagonal pacts between people and camera. The potential of such new relations drives this work, part of long-term investigations at CAMP that include histories and futures of moving images, housing, infrastructure, and pleasure.
The work has music, haunted by sirens and poets, by BamBoy (Tushar Adhav) who grew up in Lalbaug, Parel. See full credits and installation images on the works page.
A performance by our collaborators on cctv.camp, Seoul Express. More details: https://njpart.ggcf.kr/when-the-cold-blows/. Part of CAMP After Media Promises, The Nam June Paik Center Prize Exhibition.
On three screens, a city-symphony filmed by automated CCTV cameras in Amsterdam. The optical and motor capacities of these cameras are pushed to an extreme. Certain human subjects reappear near or far in the images, suggesting a form of reciprocal knowledge or intent, a secret pact between cameras and people.
Book and Web launch of a video art theory project by Dieter Daniels and Jan Thoben. Includes a presentation of their multi-format essay on njp.ma.
Talk by Shaina A in conversation with Gahee Park at the Seoul Museum of Modern Art, about the Wharfage publication and From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf .
Ashok S participates in Experimenter Curators Hub 2022.
Featuring From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf
Organised by Deichtorhallen, Hamburg and Sharjah Art Foundation, curated by Omar Kholeif.
Shaina A speaks at the Getting Real'22 conference organised by the International Documentary Association.
From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf
&
Wharfage
as part of
Proposals for a Memorial to Partition
Curated by Murtaza Vali
CAMP draws a series of lines between this and that
exhibition. Not only between country A and country
B, or horizontally between peoples or on the plane
of "cultural exchanges" or "extra-national space",
but vertically, or diagonally, reaching out to an
actual place, to its actual power and presence.
at de(Coding) Mumbai
With Shaina, Ashok, Simpreet
and Adarsh, Alyque, Naezy, Nayak, Medha, Sandeep, Rajjo, Tiger...
For All Vahanvatti is designed to help a group think from the sea, rather than from the land. CAMP with Reliable Copy Propositions.
Ashok S participated in the School of Environment and Architecture annual conference, with a suggestion on the deployment of abstractions.