Unreliable Narrators:
Stings to Leaks to Citizen Vigilantes
Digitisation has opened up new possibilities for surveillance and circulation, deployed both by and against hegemonic formations of power.
In this presentation, documentarists Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran (from CAMP) turn their attention to three categories of media central to the articulation of India as a control society over the past five years: stings, leaks, and citizen vigilante videos. The sting is a form of investigative journalism that offers entertainment value on par with Bollywood or Big Boss (India’s Big Brother). In cases such as the filming of suspects of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks undergoing narco-analysis, the sting emerges as a site at which privacy is compromised in favour of a marriage of justice and spectacle. The leak ruptures the media system to dump data on a suprahuman scale. Working with the recordings of tapped telephone conversations between Nira Radia, a corporate lobbyist, and many prominent figures in Indian business and politics that were leaked to the press in 2010, Anand and Sukumaran probe how making affective and political sense of the leak requires new forms borrowed from old media, such as cinema. Unpacking the aesthetic and political effects of the phenomenon of the citizen vigilante video—a form that became a major force in participatory democracy in India in early 2014 after the Aam Aadmi ("Common Man") party called on citizens to provide audiovisual evidence of bribe-taking officials— Anand and Sukumaran will explore how public imagination fills in the gaps evident in these testimonial media fragments.
The video art programme of the 2021 Asian Art Biennial
Presented by Pad.ma
From Stings to Leaks to Citizen Vigilantes
A video lecture
at
CAMP Roof
Tuesday June 10
7:30 - 10:30 pm
In advance of CAMP's solo at De Appel and in collaboration with LIMA - a screening of two of the studio’s earlier acclaimed projects that examine surveillance, society, and cinematic apparatus.
featuring
The Neighbour Before the House
Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar
الجار قبل الدار
Shaina A speaks about CAMPs past present future project and https://indiancina.me and https://phantas.ma at CSMVS in conjuction with A Cinematic Imagination: Josef Wirsching & the Bombay Talkies’.
Two films by CAMP
Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar (The Neighbour before the House)
From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf
in
The Unfaithful Octopus
at
MAIIAM Contemporary
with Bombay Tilts Down (2022) and A Photogenic Line, (2019) as part of Photo 24, Melbourne.
In this pair of large-scale works, CAMP explore two sides of their practice; one that produces experimental film and video, often with unusual equipment and angles of participation, and another that creates and animates archives of moving images, documents and photography.
Low-End Therapy
By Swadesi crew
Kaali Duniya (Bamboy/Tushar Adhav) with guest MC's Kranti Naari, Pratika, MC Mawali, Khabardar Revolt.
BassBrahma and RaakShas Sound
Equality on the dance floor.
A tour of the work with CAMP in three acts.
12 January 7 pm, ft. Bamboy
13 January 6 pm
14 January 7:30 pm
20 January 7 pm
7-channel environment. 13 mins, on loop with two alternating soundtracks
A vertical landscape movie in facets. Filmed remotely by one CCTV camera from a single-point location atop a 35-floor building on E. Moses Road during the pandemic.
CAMP participated in the conference: Modulating Realities at Sarai, Delhi.
What Can Happen to Paradigms of Control. A keynote lecture by Forensic Architecture Guest Professors Shaina A & Ashok S. At Goldsmiths, University of London.