Unpacking "Country of the Sea"

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.

From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, 2013

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.

The Country of the Sea

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

Indigo Waves and Other Stories:

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.

From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf

On Display at Tate Modern, Media Networks, till November 2022

In the Heart of Another Country: The Diasporic Imagination Rises

Featuring The Country of the Sea

Country of the Sea

CAMP at Transmediale 2018, Berlin with reprinted Wharfage, The Annotated "Gujarat and the Sea" Exhibition and The Country of the Sea cyanotype.

Wharfage

At first, a project on the creek in Sharjah in 2008-2009, from where a large number of ships leave for Somali ports.

Transversal Values: On New Forms of Coalitions

As politics fail, nationalist ideologies gain traction, and segregative tendencies multiply, an urge for a new, different “we” becomes apparent...

Lahore Biennale 01

CAMP at Sheher o Funn, the inaugural biennale of the city of Lahore with From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf.



Asia Pacific Triennial

From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf

Screening and conversation in collaboration with University of Pennsylvania’s Cinema & Media Studies department and CARG. At old Slought/ new Public Trust.

6:00-8:00 pm

الجار قبل الدار The Neighbour Before the House

Film screening, and conversation 6-8:00 pm

The Neighbour before the House

Geographies of Belonging

Visiting Artist Lecture Series

From Land to Sea

From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf

Vertical Integration

We are proposing this term to think more broadly about extraction, waste, dependency, rear-guarding, mediatic conversions, in- and out-sourcing, and other aspects of chains of translation and steps of decision and production.

Footage Films, Or Narrating a Dataset

with Visiting Scholars CAMP
(Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran)

We begin this fall semester's film class with a moratorium on audio-video capture.
100 days without your own images:)

From the Roof to the Sky

The Neighbour before the House
+
A Stone's Throw

August 1 – 7:30 pm
August 7 – 7:30 pm
August 12 – 7:30 pm
August 31 – 7:30 pm
with filmmaker q&a

Inlaks Fine Art Awardees 2024

CROWDED HOUSE
machines, skins, traps and five-year plans

CAMP, Urvar and Studio ON invite you to a one-day Open House of artworks and interactions with the 2024 Inlaks Fine Art Awardees, who have been in residence in Borivali for the past 4 weeks.

All Events