Experimenter, Kolkata
September 23, 2011 - December 8, 2011
This exhibition proposes an after-form and before-form for two of
art's (and our own) usual objects. The first is a film that was shot over last
year on the English Channel that is now re-installed in Kolkata, making a certain claim for its universality.
The second is a "not-yet-film" treatment of the
Radia leaks as a screenplay, with an audio guide as its
soundtrack. Both these are moments lit up by separate alignments of, broadly, government,
technology, and opportunity...
TWO STAGES OF INVENTION
In a recent CAMP project in Folkestone on the English Channel, volunteer guards filmed the sea through their telescopes for over a year, in a reinvention of "duty", a cultivation of new interests and humour, and an untooling of tools, that could be seen as universal. That is, watchkeepers, timekeepers, guards, guard-machines, fishing and shipping elsewhere are implicated, but so is the Big Society, and other questions of what happens when the state "withdraws". A film made from this footage that was installed at the location it was shot in, is now put online and simultaneously installed in the gallery in Kolkata, thus moving past its own "horizon", and starting to act at a distance.
Part two is a sketch in response to the question: when data leaks, how to approach this as an aesthetic problem? Which catching positions or hungry gods are invented by leaks, that did or didn't exist before? How to feel a leak, and by what means, especially at the scale at which recent digital leaks have occurred? In the case of the Radia tapes, TV-sized sound bytes were enough to make us all engaged voyeurs. But perhaps a more interesting kind of feeling, recognition, or effect, lies somewhere between the allure of individual conversations, and the big dump of information that the leak represents... a level that has to be invented. Suggesting such a level in the exhibition is a screenplay treatment based on the Radia tapes released so far, along with a comprehensive "audio guide" as its soundtrack.
If creativity is chain-like, with inspiration, calculation, handover, surrender, and revelatory events
in the world all appearing regularly, then what part of this is to be
displayed? No, we don't have to exhibit artistic "process" as
incompleteness, waiting, and so on. The proposal here is the opposite one: that "process" is best viewed as a concrete set of
stages, each of which offers a certain space for invention.
A screenplay in Courier 12pt melodramatic format, spanning the first three days of lobbying for cabinet spots, in the wake of the Indian general elections of 2009. The dialogue is entirely from phone taps made by the government. The screenplay slows them down and asks: what kinds of environments and scenes may lie behind them, and how are they connected?
Printed screenplay and IVR-based phone line, audience can type in scene numbers to hear dialogue in the original voices. Also performed as a reading.
Opening November 10, 6pm
With a reading of the screenplay
Act I: Swearing-in Whispers followed by a screening of
Act-II: Hum Logos
Corruption: Everybody Knows curated by Natasha Ginwala, continues through December 19, 2015 at E-flux, NY
A film that compiles observations made by volunteer guards watching the English Channel, over one year. Filmed by small cameras connected to the eyepiece of telescopes. Produced with the National Coastwatch Institution, Folkestone, Kent, UK.
60 minutes, 5.1 surround sound.
A project of listening, including with our ears, to some materials that seem to not touch us directly, but make up our "environment".
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
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.
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.
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
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.
CheMoulding Part II - FUTURING
60 years of Chemould Gallery
+
CAMP invites:
Mohit Shelare, Curve in the Desire.
++
himanshu S and aqui T, Parallel Universe.