A boat has many powers: to gather a society in its making, to distribute goods, to carry people and ideas across places that, it seems to us, are more different than ever before. The widely traveled film From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf (2009–2013), a vast, undulating, and musical spatio-temporal journey through the Western Indian Ocean, is a result of four years of dialog, friendship, and exchange between CAMP and a group of sailors from the Gulf of Kutch, who make and sail boats. They also make videos, sometimes with songs married to them. We follow their physical crossing through the gulfs of Persia and Aden, often going “where no one else wants to go”—their giant wooden boats embodying a vital order of “world-trade,” the kind that cuts perpendicularly to the phenomena of both piracy and sanctions. Structured as one season-at-sea, and made from material shot by many people, over many years, and in many formats, the film shows us a “view from the other boat,” non-imperial and made by skilled sailors and people-to-people relations, in some ways, also the other of the “distressed sea.”
Shaina Anand will a offer a pre-reading of the film text of From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf (2009-2013), as a way of connecting it to the Country of the Sea installation at Transmediale.
For All Vahanvatti is designed to help a group think from the sea, rather than from the land. CAMP with Reliable Copy Propositions.
Single exposure solar cyanotype print on cotton fabric
CAMP with Shunya collective and Clark House Initiative
22 x 5 feet
An image of the sea as its own “country”, with frontier towns at its edges disorients an easy reading of this territory
CAMP presented at the Inhabited Sea roundtable at IIT Bombay. "An initiative that seeks to create a new imaginary for the terrain of Mumbai."
Feature-length film by sea between western India, eastern Africa and the Persian gulf. First shown at a purpose built outdoor cinema on the creekside in Sharjah in 2013, where many of the sailors gather. Shown in Documenta 13 in an abridged form, as part of the installation The Boat Modes.
83 mins. Original format(s): HDV, SDV, VHS, Cellphone videos (variable). Stereo audio and in-cameraphone music.
Featuring The Country of the Sea
On Display at Tate Modern, Media Networks, till November 2022
Re-Navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora
featuring The Annotated "Gujarat and the Sea" and The Country of the Sea
Organised by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Natasha Ginwala, Hajra Haidar.
CAMP at Transmediale 2018, Berlin with reprinted Wharfage, The Annotated "Gujarat and the Sea" Exhibition and The Country of the Sea cyanotype.
At first, a project on the creek in Sharjah in 2008-2009, from where a large number of ships leave for Somali ports.
As politics fail, nationalist ideologies gain traction, and segregative tendencies multiply, an urge for a new, different “we” becomes apparent...
CAMP at Sheher o Funn, the inaugural biennale of the city of Lahore with From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf.
by Iram Ghufran
50 mins, 2023
7:00 pm
Introduction and post-screening discussion with Iram Ghufran.
A science-fiction fable set in the "miracle city" of Yiwu in China, in one of the world's largest wholesale markets for small commodities. Time is plastic as we travel into the near future, in the company of an unusual pair of guides, a mannequin and a person.
by Wang Bing
232 mins | 2023
6:30 pm*
Note* film starts earlier than usual, at 6:30pm, on account of its runtime.
There will be a short interval with food.
by Johan Grimonprez
150 mins| 2024|
7:00 pm
A story about the encounter of American Jazz and African decolonisation, via the UN and the CIA, with a lot of world around it. Featuring among others Patrice Lumumba, Krishna Menon, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Nikita Khrushchev, Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Abbey Lincoln, Adou Elenga...
Join us for a season of new films at CAMP which explore configurations and revelations of "world", amidst a world in pieces.
We begin the year with
GRAND TOUR
by Miguel Gomes
2024, 120 mins.
7:00 pm.
in memorium, Tejas Pande.
Five narratives developed in the class "Footage Films", that re-assemble archives of campus protest, Penn Museum collections, university weapons development projects, the Schuylkill river, a utopia called Shangri-La, and their intersections across time and place.
*Recalling Far From Vietnam, collectively-made essay film from 1967.
Screening and conversation in collaboration with University of Pennsylvania’s Cinema & Media Studies department and CARG. At old Slought/ new Public Trust.
Film screening, and conversation
6-8:00 pm