Khirkeeyaan, 2006
Neighbourhood TV repurposed as conversation systems in a mashup of cable TV and early CCTV systems, in an "urban village" in Delhi.
TV sets, CCTV cameras, microphones, video splitter, Rf modulator, XLR and COAX Cables. 7 episodes, Runtime various.
The seven “episodes” of this work were born out of seven sets of installations of security cameras and cable TV wiring in Khirkee Extension, an urban village in Delhi. Video became the ‘site’ for these interactions and conversations.
In 2006, when Khirkeeyaan took place, the predominant landscape of images was still (as had been for the past couple of decades) television. The security-camera quad produces a set of four “holes” in the surface of television. The fact that people who face the camera also face each other, while also facing their familiar TV sets, produces a tension in the TV image: a redistribution of the gaze, a grid of speaking and listening, and a sense of liveness that is also physically nearby.
Khirkee and Khirkee Extension are fractured by all sorts of lines: caste, religion, money, new and old settlers from different regions. Khirkee was once a feudal village, whose ‘Extension’ has been claimed and been settled in cycles since partition..
Khirkeeyaan's older traversals of this terrain, its conversations, its double logic of safety (in ones own home) and self-exposure, entered directly into a space produced by the non- overlap of land-based politics, and global communication networks.
Khirkeeyaan was realised by Shaina Anand with Aastha Chauhan and Gaurav Chandelya during "Public Art Intervention", a residency at Khoj, New Delhi in April 2006.
Thanks to Anita Dube, Tanmoy Sarkar, Manoj VP, Hemant Sreekumar
Exbhibition History
2022
Passages through Passages , Sharjah Art Foundation
2019
CAMP Beginnings Argos Centre for Art and Media, Brussels
2015
As If – I Rock, Paper, Scissors , Experimenter, Kolkata
As If – II Flight of the Black Boxes , 24 Jorbagh, New Delhi
2014
The Cinema of CAMP: Tales from the Networked Neighbourhood , Filmmaker festival, Palestrina Cinema and DOCVA, Milan
2011
Appeal for Alternatives , Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Schmela Haus, Dusseldorf
2008
Reality Effects , Henie Onstad Art Centre, Oslo
‘If we can’t get it Together’ Artists rethinking the (mal)function of Communities ,
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto
Broadcast Yourself, Artists interventions into Self-Broadcasting from the 1970’s ,
Cornerhouse, Manchester
Broadcast Yourself, Artists interventions into Self-Broadcasting from the 1970’s ,
AV Festival, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle
2006
Impossible India, Frankfurter Kunstverein
Sensor-Census-Censor, Sarai, New Delhi
Honorary Mention, Interactive Art , Ars Electronica, Linz
Public, Art , Intervention, Khoj, New Delhi
