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CAMPDossier
Matrix, installation view (partial), Theater Münster, Skulptur Projekte Münster, 2017
CAMP
Project credits
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SELECT WORKS
4Bio
A Passage Through Passages: On Roads in South Asia
A Photogenetic Line
In Cameras Res
Matrix: Skulptur Projekt Münster
Four-Letter Film
The Radia Tap(e)s
From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf
Country of the Blind, and Other Stories
Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar (The Neighbour before the House)
CCTV Social: Cold Clinic and Capital Circus
Khirkeeyaan
Windscreen
Country of the Sea
The Boat-Modes
The Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” Exhibition
Wharfage, the book
Radio Meena
Destuffing Matrix
Men-at-work With Boxes in Sterero
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CAMP is a collaborative studio based in Mumbai. By the time of its setting up in 2007, the artists Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran had already strong and well-recognised individual practices. Sukumaran had been awarded the first prize of the UNESCO digital arts award in 2006 and the Golden Nica of the Prix Ars Electronica the following year, 2007. He had lectured at venues such as the Tate Modern, and participated in the Singapore Biennial, 2006. Anand had done a series of well received projects with contemporary image media, and had exhibited at venues such as the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Serpentine Galleries London, Nottingham Contemporary, Cornerhouse Manchester, Khoj and Sarai New Delhi, Powerplant Toronto and more.
CAMP’s reason to exist is that it produces and sustains long duration and sometimes large scale artistic work. Their provocative films and projects over the past fifteen years have shown how deep technical experimentation and artistic form can meet. In that their work extracts new qualities and experiences from contemporary life and materials, CAMP is truly producing new art today. Their work is closely tracing global phenomena: ships, CCTV, the emotional state of workers and guards, phone leaks, cinematic, digital and energetic media. That is done so with a real intimacy with the material, a committed politics, a care for the formal and experiential, and their utterly unique combination of skills is seen in the span of their activities and their mark on the Indian and global art world.
From their home base in Chuim village, Mumbai they run the online archives Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, and the Mankhurd community space, R and R among other activities including their long-running roof-top cinema.
Their artworks have exhibited at Skulptur Project Münster (2017), Documenta13 (2012) and 14 (2017), MoMA (2015) and New Museum (2012), and Tate Modern (2017). They have participated in Biennials of Gwangju, Taipei, Shanghai, Sharjah, Liverpool, Lahore and Kochi- Muziris, and their work has shown at film venues such as the Flaherty Seminar and Anthology Film Archives, the London Film Festival and the Viennale, amongst other festivals, museums, and platforms. In 2015, they presented a major survey of their works across five solo exhibitions titled As If I–V that took place across museums an galleries in Kolkata, New Delhi and Mumbai. In 2018, they organised Fwd: Re: Archive, a month-long international workshop and symposium on archiving practices to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the online platform Pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) and from 2016-2018 curated The New Medium, a cinema programme for the Mumbai Film Festival. A recent exhibition titled Beginnings at the Argos Center for Art and Media in Brussels framed early formative works of its founding members, as “proto camp”, displaying the techne and ethos that grounds CAMP’s work to-date.
Current projects include Past, Present, Future, a deep excavation of public histories of the city of Mumbai through print media, cinema, and institutional archives and a five-year long Anthropology of Roads in South Asia project in collaboration with School of Oriental and African Studies, and University of Edinburgh. Visit studio.camp for an in-depth look at their roster of events, projects, collaborations and works since inception. More here: https://studio.camp/shortguide/.
BIOhttps://Studio.CAMP E-mail: [email protected]
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A PASSAGE THROUGH PASSAGES: ON ROADS IN SOUTH ASIA
5 screen film, HD video, 5.1 sound, 85 min, 2020
Install view, Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London, 2020
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A PASSAGE THROUGH PASSAGES: ON ROADS IN SOUTH ASIA 5 screen film, HD video, 5.1 sound, 85 min
2020
The film installation takes us on new and recently rebuilt roads across South Asian regions of Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and India. It travels through the early twentieth century to the central-Indian “Nagpur Road Plan” of 1943 before heading to the hope, promise, acceleration and hubris of later decades. It takes now-impossible journeys across nation-states, on roads after and before conflicts, and onto coralline oceanic edges.
Endoscopic views from the interior of the road system, and forays across the porous membranes through which pride, money, data, climate and vulnerability are connected to it, heighten our sense of developmental possibility, failure, and the deep ambiguity of road achievements. A Passage Through Passages is inspired by ethnographic and archival work in five field sites.
Links:https://studio.camp/works/passages/
5-channel install view, excerpts: https://studio.camp/resources/Install_View__A_Passage_through_Passages_1.mp4https://studio.camp/resources/Install_View__A_Passage_through_Passages_2.mp4
Exhibition history:A Passage Through Passages, Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London (solo)
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Notes on the film by CAMP
Two formal gestures foreground the film.
One is the idea of a faceted view in which you could be standing at one point, like the mysterious ‘zero-mile’ monument does in the middle of Nagpur city, and be simultaneously thinking of the town of Jabalpur and the now obscure village of Kowtah, probably often mistaken in people’s minds for Kota in Rajasthan, with one eye to Calcutta and the other to Bombay, a foot in a hundred-year colonial effort to map a territory called India, and another in the Indian nation today. The faceted view is an overlap, against the single space and time of the classical filmic / camera eye, and ‘after’ editing on the timeline. Sometimes, like in the now-classic Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica film Videograms of a Revolution, it is about two cameras looking at the same event. More often in this film, it is about a multiplicity of journeys and resulting outward views: looking down the road, and the side of the road, while standing by the roadside, in 2017, again in 2019, memory, turn, fold, glance, repeat.
The second idea has something to do with ‘endoscopy’. This is our name for the kind of tunnel vision produced by ubiquitous dash cams, go-pros and the like. In systems terms, they have a certain encyclopaedic value. For example, that of having mapped out, as we did, the entirety of the A9 from Dambulla to Jaffna in Sri Lanka at 50 frames per second. This was a different journey from when Google’s streetview cars did the same in 2015, and some surprising comparisons could be made. Remember those in Russia which are widespread as a requirement for accident insurance, but also end up recording falling meteorites and wild animals. The point of the endoscopic view is that it is what the car sees. And bus, or truck. This roadiness leads to a peculiar kind of image: like a CCTV system does, or an intestinal probe. It has its own interests and fascinations that only sometimes overlap with those of humans. At the dawn of (the fantasy of) the self-driving car, and in the dense matrix of automated toll booths and new world infrastructure projects, the view from transport, quite literally, has something to say about the hopes and fears of this, let’s say, century.
A Passage Through Passages takes a journey that no single person could today undertake, for reasons of national politics. It travels on both infamous and obscure roads, roads made as pride, as duty, as defence, as investment, as welfare and as oppression. We saw our job as not to measure the relative dominance of each of these factors, but rather to feel and taste the mix. The title riffs on the classic orientalist text A Passage to India, by saying that here and now, the ethnographic questions overlap with systemic ones. It also contains a hidden acknowledgement of networks beyond roads and the ways in which an Indian artist group followed an Italian ethnographer down a road in Madhya Pradesh, and tried to make something else of it.
The film begins in central India, rotating around the base of the Nagpur measurement tower and around ideas central to India post-independence: village development, volunteerism, planning, seva, shramdaan, and technological progress. Nagpur is a useful place to evaluate how these ideals look today, from the point of view of a right-wing ideology with an HQ there, which currently drives nation-state thinking on these issues.
A PASSAGE THROUGH PASSAGES: ON ROADS IN SOUTH ASIA 5 screen film, HD video, 5.1 sound, 85 min
2020
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Part 1 is about a toll road in Madhya Pradesh, and begins with the figure of foraging sheep, of free lunches by the roadside, and of the Raika, or sheepherders from Rajasthan who travel on this road among many others, tarred or not. It has events and flashes that are drawn from the above-mentioned Tommaso Sbriccoli’s five-day walk down the road. One flash takes place on Independence Day, where a group of toll-booth managers exhort the toll operators to not break the system, to think of the nation. The fact that the profit from this road goes into international finance networks remains conveniently invisible at such times. Another flash occurred on an edit table, when a map from 1891 was overlaid onto a contemporary satellite image, and it snapped perfectly into place. Sometimes, facets turn out to be the same.
Part 2 was an insert or bridge about a place in western India very familiar to Edward Simpson, with whom we have travelled, near here, on more watery roads. The tale of the horse-riding Jakhs is a classic story of appropriation, but also a lesson in the ambiguity of images and icons. Images of mines and their aftermaths in Kutch take us over the border to Tharparkar, where a brand-new Chinese funded mining project needed a new road. And from there to Sri Lanka, on the A9 to Jaffna both before and after the war, and from there to the new island-hopping roads of the Maldives. There is a small lesson there in the Addu island story, from a casual and low-key biker ‘gang’, about how to use a road for pleasure.
During our engagements with professional anthropologists on the project, we found them curious about and actively engaged in what one may call neighbouring contexts: Luke Heslop in Sri Lanka via his PhD work, Edward Simpson through a book or two in Kutch adjoining western MP, and Mustafa Khan in the so-near-yet-so-far Kutch, from the other side so to speak. In a way their interests had migrated from nearby worlds. This led us to think about the migrating voice and idea, or the one that is operable in more than one field site. Which, in turn, became important for the film in the ways in which understandings are relayed across these sites, i.e. there is a passing of the ball, and a twining of the thread.
Who gets to think and talk about the whole? Coming from a film practice that has resisted Voice-of-God narrators as well as essay-style author-driven voiceovers, we were interested to see what the distribution of speech and ideas looked like in the film. The distribution that is now present in the film is made up of about 20 voices, many of whom appear exactly twice, or in two different contexts. These people are, or play, novelist-editors, student-experts, ethnographer-bikers, planner-activists, villager-historians, actor-subjects, and more. They perform a spreading around of ideas and knowledges of the roads, beyond the studiers and the studied.
And, finally, to return to a technical point: this film is a composition made from diverse sources. It relays its debts and sources and wishes to be part of relays in turn. It is part of an ecosystem of thinking and images that is trans-geographical, and that must build its own roads, against the ones of nation and empire.
A PASSAGE THROUGH PASSAGES: ON ROADS IN SOUTH ASIA 5 screen film, HD video, 5.1 sound, 85 min
2020
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A PASSAGE THROUGH PASSAGES: ON ROADS IN SOUTH ASIAPart 0, Preamble, Roads for the future – Nagpur Roads Congress 1943 and the idea of undivided IndiaInstall view (partial), Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London, 2020
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A PASSAGE THROUGH PASSAGES: ON ROADS IN SOUTH ASIAPart 0, Preamble, Nagpur Super-Highway – Contract work and NRC, 2020Install view (partial), Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London, 2020
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A PASSAGE THROUGH PASSAGES: ON ROADS IN SOUTH ASIAPart 1, A Road in Central India – State Highway 31, four-lanes, speed, and villages cut in half. Install view (partial), Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London, 2020
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A PASSAGE THROUGH PASSAGES: ON ROADS IN SOUTH ASIAPart 2, The Land of Black Hills – Towards lignite.Install view (partial), Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London, 2020
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A PASSAGE THROUGH PASSAGES: ON ROADS IN SOUTH ASIAPart 2, The Land of Black Hills – Edward Simpson, the Jakhs of KutchInstall view (partial), Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London, 2020
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A PASSAGE THROUGH PASSAGES: ON ROADS IN SOUTH ASIAPart 2, The Land of Black Hills – Earthquake and ExtractionInstall view (partial), Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London, 2020
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A PASSAGE THROUGH PASSAGES: ON ROADS IN SOUTH ASIAPart 2, The Land of Black Hills, Lignite – Resistance and Relocation (17 years later) Install view (partial), Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London, 2020
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A PASSAGE THROUGH PASSAGES: ON ROADS IN SOUTH ASIAPart 3 Resource Frontier – Road to a coalfield, Tharparkar, PakistanInstall view (partial), Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London, 2020
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A PASSAGE THROUGH PASSAGES: ON ROADS IN SOUTH ASIAAnnotated cut-out map of State Highway-31 from Jaora to Lebad in Madhya PradeshInstall view (partial), Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London, 2020
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A PASSAGE THROUGH PASSAGES: ON ROADS IN SOUTH ASIAAnnotated cut-out map State Highway-31 from Jaora to Lebad in Madhya PradeshInstall view (detail), Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London, 2020
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A PASSAGE THROUGH PASSAGES: ON ROADS IN SOUTH ASIAAnnotated cut-out map of the Northern part of the A-9 from Elephant Pass to Jaffna, Northern Sri LankaInstall view (partial), Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London, 2020
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A PASSAGE THROUGH PASSAGES: ON ROADS IN SOUTH ASIAAnnotated cut-out map of the Northern part of the A-9 from Elephant Pass to Jaffna, Northern Sri LankaInstall view (detail), Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London, 2020
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A PASSAGE THROUGH PASSAGES: ON ROADS IN SOUTH ASIAAnnotated cut-out maps of Addu Atoll Road and Male-Hulhumale connection.Install view (partial), Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London, 2020
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A PHOTOGENETIC LINE
Archival prints mounted on MDF, 100 ft. overallEd. of 5 + 2 AP
2019
Install view (partial) Chennai Photo Biennale, Senate House, Chennai. Install view (partial), Chennai Photo Biennale, Senate House, Chennai, 2019
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A 100-foot long branching sequence of cutouts drawing from the photo archives of The Hindu, a 140-year old newspaper. Cutouts here are a way of reframing existing photographs as new organisms, not to remove their background environments, nor to frame heroic figures, but to create a new boundary or border for the image. This border, interior or exterior, leads one to the next image.
The sequence evolves by following one or more of three basic rules :
a. People in the images grow older, or younger.
b. Things in the background come into the foreground, or vice versa.
c. Two photo captions refer to each other. The line generated in this way, crosses many perceptual (shape), historical (time) and geographic (political) boundaries. Here, like in cinema, the cut is not a brick wall but an invitation: for increased traffic at any border.
A Photogenetic Line was first produced for the Chennai Photo Biennale 2019, supported by The Hindu.
Links:https://studio.camp/works/photogenetic/
Video walkthrough with narration: https://youtu.be/9qpfue6j9x0Handguide with descriptions for the cutouts: https://studio.camp/files/CAMP_A_Photogenetic_Line_Hand_Guide_9qqCs2j.pdf
Exhibition history:A Photogenetic Line, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2019 (solo)
Fauna of Mirrors, Chennai Photo Biennale, Senate House, Chennai, 2019
A PHOTOGENETIC LINE Archival prints mounted on MDF100 ft. overall, Ed. of 5 + 2 AP
2019
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A PHOTOGENETIC LINEInstall view (detail), Chennai Photo Biennale, Senate House, Chennai, 2019
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A PHOTOGENETIC LINE Install view (partial), Chennai Photo Biennale, Senate House, Chennai, 2019
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A PHOTOGENETIC LINE Install view (partial), Chennai Photo Biennale, Senate House, Chennai, 2019
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A PHOTOGENETIC LINEInstall view (partial), Chennai Photo Biennale, Senate House, Chennai, 2019
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A PHOTOGENETIC LINE Install view (panoramic), Experimenter, Kolkata, 2019
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A PHOTOGENETIC LINE Install view (partial view in sequence), Experimenter, Kolkata, 2019
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A PHOTOGENETIC LINE Install view (partial view in sequence), Experimenter, Kolkata, 2019
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A PHOTOGENETIC LINE Install view (partial view in sequence), Experimenter, Kolkata, 2019
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A PHOTOGENETIC LINE Install view (detail), Experimenter, Kolkata, 2019
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A PHOTOGENETIC LINE Install view (partial view in sequence), Experimenter, Kolkata, 2019
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A PHOTOGENETIC LINE Install view (partial view in sequence), Experimenter, Kolkata, 2019
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A PHOTOGENETIC LINE Install view (detail view in sequence), Experimenter, Kolkata, 2019
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A PHOTOGENETIC LINE Install view (detail view in sequence), Experimenter, Kolkata, 2019
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A PHOTOGENETIC LINE Install view (detail view in sequence), Experimenter, Kolkata, 2019
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IN CAMERAS RES
3-Channel, 4K CCTV Video, 20 min 40 secEd. of 3 + 2 AP
2019
Install view, De Appel, Amsterdam, 2019
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On three screens, a city-symphony filmed by automated CCTV cameras in Amsterdam. The optical and motor capacities of these cameras are pushed to an extreme. Certain human subjects reappear near or far in the images, suggesting a form of reciprocal knowledge or intent, a secret pattern between cameras and people.
In Cameras Res is an exhibition in which CAMP suggests the optical equivalent of the literary concept (in Latin) In Medias Res, in which the narrative begins in the middle of a plot, or evolutionary sequence. An In-Camera edit is one done without a separate editing process, like with a film camera. An In-Camera proceeding in the legal sense, is one from which spectators and jurors are excluded, thus the opposite of a public trial.
In Cameras Res takes its points-of-view from Amsterdam’s historical buildings, the former Royal Dutch Shell Headquarters (now A’DAM Tower), The former NHM building (Netherlands Trading Society, now Stadsarchief Amsterdam) and the former Tetterode printing foundry (now artist ateliers), connecting them to the surrounding landscape via camera-controlled shots. Each film in the exhibition was captured from a single camera position, and each uses a distinct editing technique. We see several micro and macro versions of the city, in different weather and light conditions.
Here, CAMP speculates about future images and future awareness, via the question: What can cinema be in this time where there are more cameras than people? This exhibition is the resulting project of a De Appel commission.
Links:https://studio.camp/works/incameras/
Install view excerpt: https://studio.camp/resources/IN_CAMERAS_RES_VIDEO.mp4In Cameras Res, Third channel excerpt, 11 min: https://studio.camp/resources/IN_CAMERA_RES_CHANNEL3_EXCERPT.mp4Exhibition handout: https://studio.camp/files/CAMP_in_cameras_res_16_march_to_20th_april_19.pdf
Exhibition history:In Cameras Res, De Appel, Amsterdam, 2019 (solo)
3-channel, 4K CCTV Video, 20 min 40 secEd. of 3 + 2 AP
2019IN CAMERAS RES
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This project is the most recent piece in your long-sustained engagement with the mechanics of capture. Can you discuss some of the origins of this line of work?
At first, it comes from a deep criticism and review of the Documentary relation between ethnography and cinema. CAMP’s practice posits this as a set of triangular relationships between subjects, authors and technologies. Their dynamics create different regimes of images, sometimes in very subtle ways. The camera and compositing technologies are an important but less-observed factor. For example the first cameras we bought more than a decade ago were static CCTV cameras at €10 a piece, that along with a video multiplexer and hundreds of meters of coax and XLR cables, cost less than a small mini-dv camera. These CCTV systems were then coupled with household TV screens and microphones to create day-long neighbourhood conversation zones across an urban village in New Delhi, in a project called Khirkeeyaan. The gaze of lens-based authorial filmmaking was fractured here, along the cross-hair grid of a CCTV multiplexer. Subjects looked out at us and at each other, and could enter and leave.
In an even earlier work by Ashok (Windscreen), the mechanics of video capture was clear in a sculpture made from paper pixels held up by wind, interrupted in jagged pixelated forms by the subjects body. The triangular ecosystem of image and narrative generation extends into systems of storage and distribution. In the early years we worked with FM, parasite cable and TV infrastructures, local broadcasting and narrow casting as well as the early internet. There was a desire to be intimate with large ecologies of communication and capture, but also to make our own, with our own set of rules. For us, that’s what new cinema is about: the navigation of these landscapes and new forms of address it produces.
Perhaps we could also talk about how these mechanics have changed over time, along with changes in technology and cinematic aesthetics?
We can move from the CCTV/cable TV mash-up described above, which is really about an alternative imagery for television, to what happens with other visual institutions and practices. We are not fans of “poor image” theories because images have travelled in many directions not defined by resolution or originality. In our film From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf there is a sort of equivalence between low and hi-res images, and there are over 25 camera people in the credits. So the typical ethnographic subject has moved location and is now pointing cameras at the world, replete with music from their onboard playlists.
We did projects by attaching cheap point-and-shoot still/video cameras to telescopes, by entering CCTV control rooms, or with leaked security footage. There is an interest in how these technologies and the people working with them can be encouraged to hybridise and think about images in ways not “captured” by their current deployment. After all, the whole of CCTV is a kind of monumental ecosystem of image waste, waiting for an event. We are interested in where in the network we can add a machine, a person, an idea, a new practice to trouble this settled function of images. We also run an online footage archive, Pad.ma, which is about paying a lot of attention to that waste, to what gets cut out at a particular time and place. Several of our recent projects use a single PTZ camera, a bit like in the Camera Obscura tradition, to disturb its workings from the very basic premises.
IN CAMERAS RESInterview with CAMP by Rachel Rakes
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You have made projects using CCTV or surveillance tech in several cities—where some elements of the cityscape are necessary instigators in the works—I’m curious how this has informed your sense of these places?
Yes, this is very interesting and specific. For example, in 2008 we made a film using the 206 cameras inside the then-largest mall in Europe (CCTV Social: Capital Circus), which was rebuilt to cover the historic city-centre after the old mall in Manchester was bombed by IRA. “Saved by the bomb”, said the tabloids as city planners spruced up so-called “Gunchester” by kickstarting a regeneration campaign with massive CCTV infrastructure. The match-cut continuity of this film was inspired from another project where we, and subsequently members of the public, had entered CCTV control rooms in Manchester (CCTV Social: Cold Clinic) and seen camera operators in action. In both these cases, hundred-plus participants in front of the cameras signed special image release forms (so that we could access the footage under provisions of the UK data protection act) that were about a claim to their own appearance as CCTV subjects, as much as a classic image release.
In Palestine, in and around East Jerusalem, 8 families filmed from the privacy of their homes, watching the feed from rooftop Pan-Tilt-Zoom cameras, on their TV sets (The Neighbour before the House). A film production made possible without acknowledging or seeking permission from the Israeli state, and re-orienting the subject position of an eternally interned citizen. Instead of bearing witness in the usual way, these families controlled cameras which were set at a vantage point on their own homes, and narrated stories of their life and the landscape of their city. The result is very close to what Masao Adachi and his comrades referred to as ‘landscape theory’, where the image allows you to understand power and control, or a somewhat intimate portrait of what Eyal Weizman called the ‘3 dimensionality of occupation’. The full footage of this project is in the public domain, and is still referenced by many studying Jerusalem city.
There were CCTV projects in Rostock at the G8 summit (Kneipness or Wellness at the camp), in Ljubliana piggy-backing on public CCTV via internet, in Bombay by mounting hi-res PTZ cameras on cinema halls and using the image live on IMAX screens, in our studio as a neighbourhood virtual tour, and as a general possibility in all film work we do. One of the lessons from all this has been that CCTV, embedded in urban environments today, has become accepted without being fully digested. Its scope, duration and distribution remain somewhat in-assimilable into our existing human senses and existing cinematic genres. It has to do with an aesthetic of continuous scanning, extreme changes in scale (zoom-ability) and integration into urbanity in instrumental but invisible ways. CCTV itself is an infrastructure, i.e. it is also a system on which other things are built, a future that Michael Klier’s film The Giant, who angularly looked down onto German cities of the time, seemed to suggest already in 1984. The ‘Giants’ of today track cars and recognise people. How can we reconnect the vastness and inhumanity of CCTVs technological side to a perceptual system called cinema? This question is also related to others. In Amsterdam, a city with a rich tradition of new media theory and art, a poster at the Waag put it bluntly: ‘Smart city - Dumb citizens’. Of course this is a provocation, but it is also the type of local challenge In Cameras Res enters into.
IN CAMERAS RESInterview with CAMP by Rachel Rakes
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I would like to ask about your work here with actors—individuals you have planted in certain scenes that add a new kind of narrative woven within the surveillance footage. Can you discuss their place in the work?
Yes, we have used them before as well, such as with the above Manchester examples. The point in both instances is to introduce some doubt as to who is an actor and who isn’t. This creates a tension around awareness that is something like an uncanny reverse of fiction cinema. People are going around their daily lives, but there is some explicit or implicit understanding in everyone of being watched. Sometimes this spills over into ‘acting’, sometimes it doesn’t. Here they are arriving into the work as surprises, as special agents who have a connection to the inner project of the camera.
How has your work around the aesthetics and politics of visual security affected the other work you do—other films, organising, installations, or research?
Let us answer in this way. No one at CAMP is on any social media platforms. This is not the internet we are interested in. With projects like Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma it has been about a different kind of attention to materials, and a series of friendships around building things and exchanging knowledge. In our art practice we are happy to parse through large amounts of data in DIY automated processes, or deploy digital flotsam of all kinds as parts of our films. These things come from living and breathing digital materials. At the same time, we’ve built book scanners and libraries, and in general believe that “access” is also about new sensual encounters that happen through and around the internet. This is different than with social media internet, where surveillance and dataveillance are the combined background rules to its community—aspects that are only now coming into a wider understanding.
IN CAMERAS RESInterview with CAMP by Rachel Rakes
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IN CAMERAS RESInstall view (partial), De Appel, Amsterdam, 2019
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IN CAMERAS RESInstall view, De Appel, Amsterdam, 2019
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IN CAMERAS RESInstall view, De Appel, Amsterdam, 2019
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IN CAMERAS RESInstall view, De Appel, Amsterdam, 2019
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IN CAMERAS RESInstall view, De Appel, Amsterdam, 2019
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MATRIX: SKULPTUR PROJEKT MÜNSTER
Site-specific installation with electric cable, switches, speakers, monitors, custom electronics2017
Matrix, installation view (partial), Theater Münster, Skulptur Projekte Münster, 2017
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MATRIX: SKULPTUR PROJEKT MÜNSTER 2017Site-specific installation at Theater Münster. Electric cable, switches, speakers, monitors, custom electronics
Matrix: Of mother, womb, array, environment in which more specialised structures can grow.
In 1956, the Stadttheater Münster is the first theatre in Germany to re-open after the war. And while most of the city of Münster was rebuilt as historic replica, an intervention by a group of young architects resulted in a “thunderclap” of bewildering pink mosaic tiles and blue glass wrapped around a fragment of ruin. A singular event in the city’s history, that was unlikely to take place again.
About 16 years after the gala opening of the theater and during the construction of a new wing, an artists’ group from a different zeitgeist proposed an outdoor “matrix” or dark mother sky of wires, as a symbolic counterpart to the 1200 hard-to-change lightbulbs of the interior “lamp sky” of the main theatre hall. Further, seizing the open ends of Norbert Kricke’s Spacetime Plastic wire sculpture in the front of the theatre, they extended black wires outward till they hit the neighbour institutions: the Volksbank and Münster Zeitung, while ignoring the churches. They also claimed that the mesh sky was a reintroduction of the 4th wall of theatre, without ever clarifying further. Except to say that in the future, it would have something to do with surveillance.
In the mid-1980’s, a youth connected the grid with an electric switch to the nearest church. This was followed by other peculiar inventions, such as in the early 1990’s when a composer brought photographs, an old song, a film and a live feed from the bank into its own matrix, that could be experienced through the glass and without a ticket.
Uses of the matrix have continued since, and in the Münster Sculpture Project of 2017 you can see several of them together, as survivors and benders of time.
Links:https://studio.camp/works/Matrix_2017/
A text by CAMP in the Skulptur Projekt Münster 2017 catalogue: https://studio.camp/files/Sources_CAMP.pdf
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MATRIX: SKULPTUR PROJEKT MÜNSTERMockup, overview of the theater and its surroundings in 1956 and the wire sky in red connecting the ruin and the theater to the Volksbank, the Münsterche Zeitung and the church.
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MATRIX: SKULPTUR PROJEKT MÜNSTERDiagram of actions for the four switches.
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MATRIX: SKULPTUR PROJEKT MÜNSTERSwitch operated scenes from the 1956 film ‘1984’ (Michael Anderson), and lyrics from ‘Als-Ob (As-If)’ by Leo Strauss (1944) on the facade of the theater.
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MATRIX: SKULPTUR PROJEKT MÜNSTERSwitch operated scenes from the 1984 film ‘De Riese (The Giant)’ by Micheal Klier, and lyrics from ‘Als-Ob (As-If)’ by Leo Strauss on the facade of the theater.
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MATRIX: SKULPTUR PROJEKT MÜNSTERSwitch triggers the church bells in a call and response from a single bell to a 16 beat riff.
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MATRIX: SKULPTUR PROJEKT MÜNSTERVirtual person appears on the window of the office of the dally newspaper in response to the switch.
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MATRIX: SKULPTUR PROJEKT MÜNSTERVirtual person appears on the window of the office of the dally newspaper in response to the switch.
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FOUR-LETTER FILM
4 x 14-segment characters, LED strip lights, DMX controller, custom electronics, computer, 17 min approx.
Ed. of 5 + AP2015/2017/2019
Install view, As If - II Flight of the Black Boxes, facade of 24 Jorbagh, New Delhi, 2015
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A conversation between two people, at the smallest possible bandwidth, that one could call “film”, or narrative. Made of four alphanumeric characters, each having 14 segments. First made using Christmas lights in 2004. Remade in 2015.
Links:https://studio.camp/works/4LF/
Install view (excerpts), As If - II Flight of the Black Boxes, 24 Jorbagh, New Delhi, 2015:https://studio.camp/resources/4LF_ASIF_Partone.mp4https://studio.camp/resources/4LF_ASIF_part2.mp4Install view (excerpts) Could Have Beens, Ten Days, Six Nights, The Tanks, Tate Modern, London, 2017: https://studio.camp/resources/CAMP_CLIP_4_LF_TATE.mp4
Exhibition history:CAMP: Beginnings, Argos Center for Art and Media, Brussels, 2019 (solo)Could Have Beens, Ten Days, Six Nights, The Tanks, Tate Modern, London, 2017As If - II Flight of the Black Boxes, 24 Jorbagh, New Delhi, 2015 (solo)
FOUR-LETTER FILM 4 x 14-segment characters, LEDstrip lights, DMX controller, custom electronics, computer, 17 min approx. Ed. of 5 + AP
2015/2017/2019
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FOUR-LETTER FILMInstall view, As If - II Flight of the Black Boxes, facade of 24 Jorbagh, New Delhi, 2015
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FOUR-LETTER FILMInstall view, CAMP: Beginnings, Argos Centre for Art and Media, Brussels, 2019
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FOUR-LETTER FILMInstall view, CAMP: Beginnings, Argos Centre for Art and Media, Brussels, 2019
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FOUR-LETTER FILMInstall view, Could Have Beens, Ten Days, Six Nights, The Tanks, Tate Modern, London, 2017
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FOUR-LETTER FILMInstall view, Could Have Beens, Ten Days, Six Nights, The Tanks, Tate Modern, London, 2017
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FOUR-LETTER FILMInstall view, As If - II Flight of the Black Boxes, facade of 24 Jorbagh, New Delhi, 2015
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THE RADIA TAP(E)S
Act I, Swearing-in Whispers, Screenplay with phone response, 95 pagesAct II, Hum Logos, Phone with audio text, 45 min
Ed. of 5 + 2 AP2012
Citizen-Artist: Forms of Address, Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai 2013
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The lobbyist is a rhetorician-in-private, group persuader and network player. When her government-tapped phone conversations leak (the Radia Tap(e)s, 2009) they undergo multiple “phase shifts”, becoming TV sound-bytes, scam proofs, lengthy transcripts with short urls.
Act I, Swearing-in Whispers, is a screenplay in which some of these texts re-group, trying to again become images, and sounds, threatening to appear in a certain three-hour, melodramatic format. This screenplay is based on four days of the Radia Tap(e)s, prior to the formation of the cabinet of ministers after Indian general elections in 2009.
Act II, Hum Logos, is a film that begins where the screenplay ends. It is more modest, perhaps imagining life as an online video. It begins when some top journalists claim that they were just lying to Radia “a source” on the phone, and their conversations had no basis in and impact on reality. This paradoxically opens a window into the broader spectrum of rhetorics: including lies, cries, memes, pen drives, bad networks and family feuds, pulsing through the nervous system of Indian democracy.
Links:Act I, Swearing-in Whispers : https://studio.camp/works/swearingin/Act II, Hum Logos: https://studio.camp/works/humlogos
Previews:https://studio.camp/files/ACT_I_CAMP_SWEARING-IN_WHISPERS.pdfhttps://studio.camp/resources/ACTII_Hum%20Logos_H.264_PCMle.mov
Exhibition and performance history:Corruption, Everybody Knows, E-flux, New York City, 2016As If – tV, Clark House Initiative, Mumbai, 2015 (solo)Nirankusha Fearless Speak, Bangalore, 2014 MoMA, New York City, 2014Flaherty Seminar, New York, 2014Tales from the Networked Neighbourhood: The Cinema of CAMP, Careof, DOCVA, Milan, 2014 (solo)Closely Guarded Phone Calls, Films Division, Mumbai, 2013Citizen-Artist: Forms of Address, Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, 2013Two Stages of Invention, The Skoda Prize Show (shortlist), National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, 2013 (solo)Gwangju Biennale 9, 2012Ungovernables, New Museum Triennial, New York City, 2012Two Stages of Invention, Experimenter, Kolkata (2011) (solo)
2012THE RADIA TAP(E)S – ACT I & ACT II Act I – Screenplay with phone responses, 95 pagesAct II – Phone with audio text, 45 min
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HOW TO FEEL A LEAK?
The below text was a commissioned catalogue essay written by CAMP for The Ungovernables, New Museum, New York Triennial, 2012.
Niira Radia: Thereby he had fixed the system to get a post facto decision done . . . for a natural resource. Coal is a natural resource, right?Manish: Yeah, yeah.Niira Radia: OK, the second thing was spectrum . . .—The Radia Tap(e)s, # 066, June 9, 2009
The question, then, is not so much that of how to get people worked up and engaged, but rather how to perturb an operationally closed system in such a way that the perturbation is not registered as mere noise but rather generates information that leads to the selection of different system states.—Levi Bryant, “Depression and Capitalism,” June 2, 2010, [https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/depression-and-capitalism/]
All systems, including so-called “open systems,” revel in a kind of tunnel vision. In systems theory, this tunnel vision is called operational closure.[1] Which means that a system only “sees” other parts of itself, and is open only to those external events it at least partly anticipates, or can organizationally process. The rest is noise, or blackness, or worse. (We could remind ourselves that human-body systems did not “expect” nuclear radiation, and cannot process mains electricity or crude oil.)
Water flowing into Mumbai from distant reservoirs has no way to “feel” the people walking on or living next to its pipelines. The water distribution system only sees pumping stations, bends, pressures, and consumers; it hears very faintly, and cannot recognize, the protestations coming from neighborhoods and farms that it bypasses or even, tragically, the rain that falls down all over its “network.” Systems simply translate all external influences into their own internal terms. So that dharnas (protests) create only the most insignificant of ripples inside a water pipe. Operational closure appears then as a horrifying dystopia: How do we ever connect a water system to a people or a society? How can people ever care for or influence a water system? If the axiom of operational closure holds, then it is not possible to do this directly; we need governments, councillors, plumber mafias, money, and other powerful chains of mediators in order to make any connection at all. Is this just the price to be paid for modern life? Or can such an ontology also lead to other consequences, other tones, especially if horror and dystopia are not one’s favorite genres? Are we ultimately looking for “systemic reforms”, or are there other possibilities entirely?
Water leaks, all the time. A leaking pipe casts some doubt on its own systematicity. How open can an “open system” be? (How much material and energy can really be exchanged with the environment, while still maintaining oneself as a system?) Leaks are the exact opposite of a system’s ability to translate everything into its own terms. It is when something internal escapes such terms altogether, and can produce unforeseen relations and operations, that it is said to leak. If an incoming flood into a basement is unassimilable, disastrous, does this mean that the system has changed state, or is it a new ecosystem altogether, with marine life and new electrical dangers? Leaks, in the willful and ideological sense in which, say, Wikileaks operates, or as the metaphorical and astructural
THE RADIA TAP(E)S – ACT I & ACT II
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phenomenon that Raqs Media Collective calls “seepage,” or as an actual battleground for infrastructural control across the physical, chemical, wasteful, or managerial aspects of the supply chains of any city, all perturb a “systemic” understanding of reality. Leaks possess timing tricks and sideways moves that often surprise and overwhelm systems.
Leaks cannot operate in a vacuum. So their defense, on the one hand, relies on a relationship with existing structures, usually an implied one of critique, which is only the first step in imagining what to build next. On the other hand, the promises that leaks make are necessarily vague, pointing toward an infinite, suspended potentiality. A cloud that fills the sky but never rains . . . is a fog. More leaks, mean more fog. To say that leaks themselves are a form of freedom is too much like saying that information is “out there,” or that clouds have enough water for everyone on earth. In this situation, what we may need is what in the Peruvian mountains is called a “fog catcher”: the art and science of luring a cloud and making it rain a bit, for you.[2] And ideally, for everyone else in your village, too. Let’s be more concrete. Leaks are somewhat inevitable, as electricity providers, ship engineers, and book publishers have found out. In each case, there have been ways to feed leaks back into adjoining systems of management and control. Ships have bilge pumps but also ballast tanks. Electricity providers “farm” leaks by bringing them into billing regimes, even if the recipients themselves are illegal and without identity papers. Book publishers deploy legal threats while hastily building their own e-book platforms, hoping that some people would rather pay a dollar than commit a crime. The water mafia has a keen understanding of, and hunger for, leaks. The limits of a critique of structure are clear. In such cybernetic loops, leaks and structures become indistinguishable. Another approach is needed. Our fog-catcher image suggests that it is not only a matter of catching or releasing leaks. It is also a matter of how to tune into them, using specially made antennas and a collective sensibility. Ultimately, to turn them into something else—a fog into a hot soup, a TV transmission leaking from across the border into a VHS birthday present.[3] This seemingly magical project is also one of art: of small humans trying to seduce and transform something large, unformatted, and unruly.
This cannot be done with one’s “bare hands.” Digital leaks, for example, tend to produce a volume of material that cannot be understood easily. One is awash in it, and yet unable to grasp anything. The situation suggests new aesthetic categories and new craft. It need not mean that search replaces thinking or that all data has to be “visualized” but that new modes engage in new struggles. The project of apprehending leaks will recognize that this feeling may not be produced in a direct way. It may involve machines, collaborations, and durations. It will require experimentation.
To embrace the leak as a cogent cultural force of our times, we need to create more levels, more senses between the celebration of leakiness as such, its critiques of structure, the bite-sized voyeurisms that mainstream media offers, the lengthy analyses produced by academics and analysts, and the vast dump of information that leaks really are. In other words, we have to figure out how to feel a leak.
1. See Humberto Maturana on operational closure, autopoesis and self-organisation, Niklas Luhmann’s subsequent and unliked-by Maturana use of it in sociology and Levi Bryant’s recent evocation of Luhmann’s work in his book The Democracy of Objects (Open Humanities Press, 2011).
2. Fog catchers are meshes stretched like volleyball nets often on high mountain ridges in arid Peru, causing the condensation of passing clouds into a water supply.
3. A 1980s practice involving Pakistani plays, a VCR, and a Punjabi family we know.
THE RADIA TAP(E)S – ACT I & ACT II
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THE RADIA TAP(E)S, ACT I – SWEARING-IN WHISPERSMounted screenplay and IVR phone responseInstall view, Skoda Prize (shortlist) National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, 2013
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THE RADIA TAP(E)S, ACT I – SWEARING-IN WHISPERSMounted screenplay and film Install view, Skoda Prize (shortlist) National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, 2013
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THE RADIA TAP(E)S, ACT II – HUM LOGOSPage from screenplay with IVR phone response
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THE RADIA TAP(E)S, ACT II – HUM LOGOSFilm stills
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THE RADIA TAP(E)S, ACT I – SWEARING-IN WHISPERSScreenplay and IVR phone responseInstall view, Two Stages of Invention, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2011
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THE RADIA TAP(E)S, ACT I – SWEARING-IN WHISPERSScreenplay and IVR phone responseInstall view, Two Stages of Invention, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2011
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THE RADIA TAP(E)S, ACT I & ACT IIScreenplay and film Install view, Corruption, Everybody Knows, E-flux, New York City, 2016
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THE RADIA TAP(E)S, ACT I & ACT IIScreenplay with phone response and videoInstall view, Corruption, Ungovernables, New Museum Triennial, 2012
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THE RADIA TAP(E)S, ACT I & IIPerformance, screenplay reading, Corruption, Everybody Knows, E-flux, New York City, 2016
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THE RADIA TAP(E)S, ACT I & IIPerformance, screenplay reading and install view, Gwangju Biennale, 2012
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FROM GULF TO GULF TO GULF
Multiple video formats: HDV, SDV, VHS, cellphone (variable), 83 minEd. of 3 + 2 AP
2009-2013
Nightly screenings at the specially designed open-air cinema, Sharjah Biennial XI, 2013
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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 travelled feature-length film From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf; a vast, undulating, and musical spatio-temporal journey through the Western Indian Ocean, is a result of four years of dialogue, friendship and exchange between CAMP and a group of sailors from the Gulf of Kutch. Their travels, and those of co-seafarers from Pakistan and Southern Iran, through the Persian and Aden Gulfs show us a world cut into many pieces, not easily bridged by nostalgics or nationalists. Instead, we follow the physical crossings made by these groups of people who make and sail boats. And who also make videos, sometimes with songs married to them.
From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf was awarded the Jury mention at Festival International de Cinema, Marseille and the New Views Prize, Olhar de CInema, Curutiba. It was the opening film at Images Festival Toronto, and has been screened at BFI London Film Festival, the Viennale, MoMA, Flaherty Seminar, Shanghai Biennale among other venues. It showed in Bombay and Sharjah in purpose-built cinemas; one inside a public museum and one on the waterfront. The work is in the permanent collection of M+ museum, Hong Kong, the Sharjah Art Foundation and Tate Modern, London, where it is currently on display.
Links:https://studio.camp/works/g2g2g/
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K9NQu1Ug_gFull film: https://studio.camp/resources/CAMP_From_Gulf_to_Gulf_to_Gulf_PREVIEW.mp4Introduction to the film by CAMP (Face Value, Transmediale, HKW Berlin, 2018): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNNTV5O9Vjc
Exhibition history:Collections display: Media Networks, Tate Modern, 2020Body Building, Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai, 201940 Films: An inventory of Contemporary Cinema, Festival des Trois Continents, Nantes, 2018An Oceanic Feeling, Len Lye Center Cinema, New Plymouth, 2018Lahore Biennale 01, Alhamra Art Center, Lahore, 2018The Ocean After Nature, The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, New York, 2018Face Value, Transmediale, HKW Berlin, 2018Sekula beyond Sekula – Okeanos, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, TBA21, Vienna, 2017 Keimena, Documenta 14, 2017Water in Indian Cinema, King’s College, London, 2017
FROM GULF TO GULF TO GULF Multiple video formats: HDV, SDV, VHS, cellphone (variable), 83 min, Ed. of 3 + 2 AP
2009-2013
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The Ocean After Nature, Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide and Grossman Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, London and Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 2017 Transactions, Manifesta Parallel Exhibition, University of Zurich, 2016The Ocean After Nature, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2016 Mosaic Rooms, London, 2016After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India 1947/1997, Queens Museum, New York, 2015As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015 (solo)Mobile M+ Moving images, M+ Hongkong, 2015Shanghai Biennale, 2014Rupert, Vilnius, 2014Porto Post Doc, 2014Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris Verzio, Budapest, 2014MoMA, New York, 2014Flaherty Seminar, New York, 2014Olhar de Cinema, Curutiba, 2014Images Festival Toronto, 2014Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2014Tales from the Networked Neighbourhood: The Cinema of CAMP, Palestrina Cinema, Milan, 2014FICUNAM Mexico, 2014Mirage Cinema, March Meeting, Sharjah, 2014Dhaka Art Summit, 2014Migrating Forms Film Festival, New York, 2013 Cork Film Festival, Ireland, 2013Viennale, Vienna International Film Festival Doc Lisboa, Lisbon, 2013Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival, 2013Underdox, Munich, 2013BFI London Film Festival, 2013Festival Internationale de Cinema (FID), Marseille, 2013Le Pont, Museum of Contemporary Art, Marseille, 2013Sharjah Biennale XI, Sharjah, 2013Documenta (13), Kassel, 2012
FROM GULF TO GULF TO GULF Multiple video formats: HDV, SDV, VHS, cellphone (variable), 83 min, Ed. of 3 + 2 AP
2009-2013
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FROM GULF TO GULF TO GULFInstall view, purpose-built cinema, As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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FROM GULF TO GULF TO GULFInstall view, purpose-built cinema, As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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FROM GULF TO GULF TO GULFInstall view, purpose-built cinema, As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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FROM GULF TO GULF TO GULFInstall view, purpose-built cinema, Collections display, Media Networks, Tate Modern, London, 2019
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FROM GULF TO GULF TO GULFInstall view, M+, Hong Kong, 2015
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FROM GULF TO GULF TO GULFInstall view, Documenta (13), Kassel, 2012
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FROM GULF TO GULF TO GULFPurpose-built cinema, Documenta (13), Kassel, 2012
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“Liberalisation” via Republican Guard, s cheap diesel a * “Free ports" run by n s ruling families since c the late 1800's * t s s i o n s i o n e r k v i i r c “p a e a s a s c * Seafaring “minority community”, m ship builders since y” antiquity
“Semi-states” * where most daily goods goods come by sea
N W + E S
FROM GULF TO GULF TO GULF“Map” of area of operations, Documenta 13 guidebook, 2012
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FROM GULF TO GULF TO GULFSDV, film still
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FROM GULF TO GULF TO GULFCellphone video, film still
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FROM GULF TO GULF TO GULFHD, film still
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FROM GULF TO GULF TO GULFHD, film still
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THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND, AND OTHER STORIES
HD video through telescope, 60 minEd. of 3 + 2 AP
2011
Install view, National Coastwatch Institution, Folkestone, 2011. On screen: Families of the Royal Gurkha Rifles at Copt Point, Folkestone
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THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND, AND OTHER STORIES 2011
A 60 minute film produced with the National Coastwatch Institution, Folkestone, Kent, UK showing at the NCI cabin at Copt Point and in pubs in Folkestone harbour, as part of the Folkestone Triennial, A Million Miles from Home, 2011.
What could it mean to extend “watching the coast” to “filming the sea”? Are there any National Sea Film Institutions? There should be. Because on the one hand, as the anthropologist Michael Taussig describes it, the modern sea is an image, a wallpaper backdrop for a Malibu or Folkestone lifestyle. On the other hand, in mostly invisible movements, the seas transport more than 90% of all global trade. So from any given coastline, the sea is an image, and it is not, too. Images of the sea remind us of this situation precisely: that what you can see is always just the surface, the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
One eye or two? The inorganic, technological eye not only extends, but exacerbates human vision (i.e. could also make it worse). In a way, every optical instrument produces a new visual “medium”, like painting or television. A telescope is a medium. So is radar. So is a wink. Such mediations and their effects enter parasitic exchanges with other mediums like film or photography. For instance in the 18th Century seaside Camera Obscura, before cinema, outside which people would often line up and pay good money, just to see an image of the very same outside they just walked in from. This kind of power is not only a technical matter (it is), but also a matter of context: the lines were longest when there were lovers on the beach. For the NCI Folkestone, the usual area of interest is the immediate vicinity of Copt Point, a “blind spot” for Dover Coastguard. But binoculars don’t have speed limits, or built-in censors. In other words, what can be seen is somehow uncontrollable. It will include banana carriers and gin palaces and local fishermen that one knows. The open sea makes it impossible to watch only protectively, it asks us to watch longingly, embarrassedly and helplessly too. There is a room behind the film that you see here, full of voices, radio, and conversations. As the nature of watching shifts, sound does too, and we hear the overlap and struggles for space between different “sources”: coastguard radio, AIS, Google searches, personal memories, shared humour, BBC radio. In the so-called “big society”, volunteers will self-organise to do what the state now does. Education, basic services, and policing. But surely one of the preconditions of voluntary work is to be able to determine one’s own sense of what duty is: and in which way one chooses to become part of the images one sees, or films.
Links:https://studio.camp/works/countryoftheblind
Link to film: https://studio.camp/resources/CAMP_The_Country_of_the_Blind_PREVIEW.mp4Short introduction by CAMP (audio): https://soundcloud.com/ft2011-aurdio-guide/camp-shaina-anand-and-ashok
HD video through telescope, 60 minEd. of 3 + 2 AP
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Exhibition history:As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
Tales from the Networked Neighbourhood, The Cinema of CAMP, Palestrina Cinema, Milan, 2014
Pekham Artists Moving Image: The Sunday Painter, London, 2013
Two Stages of Invention, The Skoda Prize Show (shortlist), NGMA, New Delhi, 2013
A Million Miles from Home, Folkestone Triennial, 2011
Two Stages of Invention, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2011
THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND, AND OTHER STORIES 2011HD video through telescope, 60 minEd. of 3 + 2 AP
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THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND, AND OTHER STORIESFilmed over a year by the coast watchers from the NCI cabin in a repurposed WW II bunker as seen from the Folkestone harbour, 2011
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CHAPTERS:00:05 Fire in the warren, but Viking Princess leaves harbour00:56 Sea Shell and struggles with a pot04:03 Peter and Peter picking pots05:31 Fisheries Patrol!08 04 Genesis outside a decommissioned harbour08:49 A phone call10:48 Bombin’ it into the harbour, past all the boats there12:19 That clock has been repaired13:05 Gandhi-jaan comes to Folkestone harbour15:16 E-N-O-T-S-E-K-Lovibond-Obsolete-Fishing15:51 The Burstin and news on the radio16:22 The Mermaid16:37 Olympic tickets16:59 Paddling on Sunny Sands17:39 Canoeist? Kayaker?18:27 Wind blows the magpies, can’t see Dover19:35 Dramatic but dangerous20:36 P &O ferry sheltering from the storm21:27 Stone from the Needles22:32 You were a P & O guy, weren’t you?23:31 Saga Ruby leaves Dover for the fjords.28:12 Norwegian Sun29:00 MSC Orchestra29:27 The largest container ship in the world31:35 The Algerian Navy32:55 The Royal Navy33:54 The Belgian Navy34:31 Unknown34:56 Its there, but you can’t see it
35:48 Shabab Oman36:09 Lady Shana and MOL Magnificent36:35 COSCO Indian Ocean37:43 More boxes going south38:09 Nouadhibou39:15 A pan of the French coastline41:10 CMA CGM and, is it an island?42:18 Dungeness42:35 Drilling platform on the Osprey42:47 Is it a plane, or just the wings?43:07 A close call45:43 In contravention of Rule 10 of the collision regulations46:06 Gin palace46:36 Finally, a rainbow you can see47:04 UK Border Agency, formerly Customs and Excise47:48 Water cannon in the front48:21 Anglian Monarch49:28 Dave Watkins50:45 Survey vessel51:13 Playing survey-survey in the harbour51:25 Extremely close-up51:40 Police boat with many empty seats52:27 Up and Under54:10 An invasion of seagulls54:41 The “Archbishop” and the dig56:38 Gurkhas on the east cliff57:16 Where are you?57:55 (Sky)diver and a poem59:12 Rescue59:46 Watchkeeper and biscuit after a hard days work
THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND, AND OTHER STORIESShot list
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THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND, AND OTHER STORIESInstall view, Two Stages of Invention, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2011
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THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND, AND OTHER STORIESInstall view, ink washed Admiralty chart and light showing the viewing arc from Copt Point, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2011
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THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND, AND OTHER STORIESInstall view, Two Stages of Invention, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2011
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THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND, AND OTHER STORIES2-channel with Hindi titles, install view, As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND, AND OTHER STORIES2-channel with Hindi titles, install view, As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND, AND OTHER STORIESInstall view, Skoda Prize Show (shortlist), National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, 2013
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THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND, AND OTHER STORIESInstall view, National Coastwatch Institution, Folkestone Triennial, 2011
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THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND, AND OTHER STORIESFilm still
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THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND, AND OTHER STORIESFilm stills
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AL JAAR QABLA AL DAAR(THE NEIGHBOUR BEFORE THE HOUSE)
CCTV video with sound, 60 min, 3 working stills Ed. of 3 + 2 AP
2008-2011
Working still, CCTV camera housed on roof of a home, Old City, Jerusalem
109
Eight Palestinian families living in and around Jerusalem city look out into their neighbourhoods, via a Pan-Tilt-Zoom CCTV camera mounted on their homes. “Tripods made of stone”. A film production made possible without acknowledging or seeking permission from the Israeli state, and by re-orienting both “operational” or security images as well as subject-positions of citizens. Instead of bearing witness in the usual way, these families control the camera and look outward; a voice finds an image, an image is probed beneath its surface, as Palestinian residents evaluate the nature of their distance from others. This film is part of a long body of cinematic works by CAMP around Documentary images, surveillance, and subject awareness.
The work premiered at the Jerusalem Show in 2009, and the resulting feature length film (2011) been exhibited and screened widely including in the opening show of the Palestine Museum Birzeit, Flaherty Seminar NY, MUCEM Marseille, Yerba Buena Center for Art San Francisco, New Museum NYC, Sharjah Biennale X, and Liverpool Biennial, among other venues.
Link:https://studio.camp/works/aljaar/
Previews:Excerpts: https://youtu.be/kg64jiH2QkEFull film: https://studio.camp/resources/CAMP_The_Neighbour_Before_the_House_PREVIEW.mp4Introduction to the film by CAMP (audio): https://slought.org/resources/the_neighbor_before_the_houseStaying with the trouble: the radical work of CAMP: https://www.moderntimes.review/staying-with-the-trouble-the-radical-work-of-camp/
AL JAAR QABLA AL DAAR(THE NEIGHBOUR BEFORE THE HOUSE)
CCTV video with sound, 60 min, 3 working stills Ed. of 3 + 2 AP
2008-2011
110
Select exhibition and screening history:CAMP: Beginnings, Argos Centre for Art and Media, Brussels, 2019 (solo)CCTV TV: An evening with CAMP, LIMA, Amsterdam, 2019The Neighbour before the House, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, 2018Jerusalem Lives (Tahya Al Quds), Opening Show, Palestinian Museum, Birzeit, 2017Palestine: Territory, Memory, Projections, Mucem, Marseille, 2017As If – II Flight of the Black Boxes, 24 Jorbagh, New Delhi, 2015Unravelling Documentarism, Helsinki, 2014 Flaherty Seminar, New York, 2014Tales from the Networked Neighbourhood: The Cinema of CAMP, Palestrina Cinema, Milan, 2014Cork Film Festival, Ireland, 2013 Cinema Project, Portland, 2013 The New Museum, New York, 2011The Matter Within, Yerba Buena Center for Art, San Francisco, 2011 Sharjah Biennale X, 2011 Your name is different here, Volte Gallery, Mumbai, 2011 Nova Cinema, Trondheim, 2011Liverpool Biennial, City States, Liverpool, 2010 The Jerusalem Show, Jerusalem, 2009
AL JAAR QABLA AL DAAR(THE NEIGHBOUR BEFORE THE HOUSE)
CCTV video with sound, 60 min, 3 working stills Ed. of 3 + 2 AP
2008-2011
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AL JAAR QABLA AL DAAR (THE NEIGHBOUR BEFORE THE HOUSE)Install view, As If - Flight of the Black Boxes, 24 Jorbagh, New Delhi, 2014
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AL JAAR QABLA AL DAAR (THE NEIGHBOUR BEFORE THE HOUSE)Working still, CCTV camera on roof of house in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem/ Al Quds, 2009
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AL JAAR QABLA AL DAAR (THE NEIGHBOUR BEFORE THE HOUSE)Working still, install view, As If - II Flight of the Black Boxes, 24 Jorbagh, New Delhi, 2014
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AL JAAR QABLA AL DAAR (THE NEIGHBOUR BEFORE THE HOUSE)Film still, overlooking the Wailing Wall courtyard and the Al Aqsa mosque
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AL JAAR QABLA AL DAAR (THE NEIGHBOUR BEFORE THE HOUSE)Film still, overlooking the Dome of the Rock, what lies beneath
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AL JAAR QABLA AL DAAR (THE NEIGHBOUR BEFORE THE HOUSE)Film still, the wall between Jerusalem and the West Bank running through a house
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AL JAAR QABLA AL DAAR (THE NEIGHBOUR BEFORE THE HOUSE)CCTV video, film still
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CCTV SOCIAL: COLD CLINIC AND CAPITAL CIRCUSCCTV video, varying length
Ed. of 3 + 2 AP 2008
Working Still, members of the public inside the CCTV control room, Arndale Mall, Manchester, 2008
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In this two-part project that took place in 2008 in Manchester, Shaina Anand collaborated with Manchester Metropolitan University and the Arndale Shopping Centre to open working CCTV environments to a general audience. People normally ‘enclosed’ by these networks came into the control rooms to view, observe and monitor this condition, endemic in the UK, where there is one camera for every 6 subjects. Manchester’s Open Street Surveillance, with its Pan-Tilt-Zoom cameras and systems wired into the surrounding architecture over a decade ago were subject to demonstrations, scrutiny and inquiry by 36 participants. These hour-long sessions became somewhat like a diagnostic clinic, where symptoms, anxieties and inoculations about ‘public health’ under surveillance were meditated upon. The therapy sessions seemed to work both ways, for the participants as well as the security officers.
Cold Clinic is a Documentation of some moments, from these several hours of curious encounters. If the analog control room of MMU’s Open Street Surveillance seemed ‘just like 1984’, the CCTV control room of the new Arndale Centre, with a full coverage of the mall’s thoroughfares via 206 cameras appeared like the dystopic present day archive room of a city with a long past. With camera views labeled Exchange Square, Market Street, New Market Way, etc. the CCTV images seemed to carry an imprint of the city’s modern history, Manchester being the first industrial city in the world. The old Arndale in the historic city center was the site of an IRA bombing in 1996, the largest on UK soil, and its rebuilding (to create the largest mall in UK) was the start of Manchester’s regeneration program. By having over 100 members of the public sign ‘image release’ forms, which concatenated provisions from the UK Data Protection Act, the crew
gained ‘public’ access to the surveillance feed from the mall’s 206 cameras. Capital Circus tells the story.
Links:Capital Circus: https://studio.camp/works/circus/ Cold Clinic: https://studio.camp/projects/CCTVsocial
Previews:Capital Circus, preview: https://studio.camp/resources/CAMP_Capital_Circus_PREVIEW.mp4CCTV Social channel 1 and 2:https://studio.camp/resources/CAMP_CCTV_Social_Leftchannel_PREVIEW.mp4https://studio.camp/resources/CAMP_CCTV_Social_Rightchannel_PREVIEW.mp4
CCTV SOCIAL: COLD CLINIC AND CAPITAL CIRCUS CCTV video, varying lengthEd. of 3 + 2 AP
2008
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CCTV SOCIAL: COLD CLINIC AND CAPITAL CIRCUS CCTV video, varying lengthEd. of 3 + 2 AP
2008
Exhibition history:CAMP: Beginnings, Argos Center for Art and Media, Brussels, 2019 (solo)CCTV TV: An evening with CAMP, LIMA, Amsterdam, 2019
Could Have Beens, Ten Days, Six Nights, The Tanks, Tate Modern, London, 2017As If – I Rock, Paper, Scissors, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2015 (solo)As If – II Flight of the Black Boxes, 24 Jorbagh, New Delhi, 2015 (solo)Unravelling Documentarism, Helsinki, 2014 Lines and Nodes, Anthology Film Archives, New York, 2014 Flaherty Seminar, New York, 2014 MoMA, New York City, 2014 Bunny Smash, Design to Touch the World, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2013 The Second Order, Space Hamilton, Seoul, 2013 The Impossible Prison, Galleries of Justice, The Nottingham Contemporary, 2008 Reality Effects, Henie Onstad Art Centre, Oslo, 2008What do you want? Asian Triennial Manchester Cornerhouse, 2008
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CAPITAL CIRCUSInstall view, Could Have Beens, Ten Days Six Nights, The Tanks, Tate Modern, London, 2017
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CAPITAL CIRCUSFramed image release form, install view, Could Have Beens, Ten Days Six Nights, The Tanks, Tate Modern, London, 2017
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CAPITAL CIRCUSInstall view, Could Have Beens, Ten Days Six Nights, The Tanks, Tate Modern, London, 2017
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CAPITAL CIRCUSInstall view, As If – I Rock, paper, scissors, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2015
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CAPITAL CIRCUSCCTV video, film stills
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CAPITAL CIRCUSCCTV video, film stills
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CCTV SOCIAL: COLD CLINIC AND CAPITAL CIRCUSDual projection, install view, Bunny Smash, Design to Touch the World, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2013
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CCTV SOCIAL: COLD CLINIC AND CAPITAL CIRCUSDual projection, install view, Bunny Smash, Design to Touch the World, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2013
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COLD CLINIC2-channel, install view, As If - II Flight of the Black Boxes, 24 Jorbagh, New Delhi, 2015
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COLD CLINICInstall view, What do you want?, CornerHouse, Manchester, 2008
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COLD CLINICInstall view, The Impossible Prison, at the Police Station, Galleries of Justice, The Nottingham Contemporary, 2008
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COLD CLINICSD video, film stills
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CCTV SOCIAL: COLD CLINICSD video, film stills
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KHIRKEEYAAN
TV sets, CCTV cameras, microphones, video splitter, Rf modulator, XLR and coax cables. 7 episodes, 5 on show. Runtime various.
Ed. of 5 + 2 AP 2006-2015
Working still, Episode 2, Nepal At-Home, Khirkee Extension, New Delhi, 2006
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The seven “episodes” of this work were born out of seven sets of installations of security cameras and cable TV wiring in Khirkee, 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.
Links:https://studio.camp/works/Khirkeeyaan
Episode 2: https://studio.camp/resources/CAMP_Khirkeeyan_Episode2_Nepal_at_Home_PREVIEW.mp4Episode 3: https://studio.camp/resources/CAMP_Khirkeeyan_Episode3_7_One_Lane_PREVIEW.mp4Episode 4: https://studio.camp/resources/CAMP_Khirkeeyan_Episode4_Four_Factories_PREVIEW.mp4Episode 5: https://studio.camp/resources/CAMP_Khirkeeyan_Episode5_Doctors_Advice_PREVIEW.mp4Episode 6: https://studio.camp/resources/CAMP_Khirkeeyan_Episode6_Village_Girls_PREVIEW.mp4
KHIRKEEYAAN 2006-2015TV sets, CCTV cameras, microphones, video splitter, Rf modulator, XLR and coax cables. 7 episodes, 5 on show. Runtime various, Ed. of 5 + 2 AP
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Exhibition history:CAMP: Beginnings, Argos Center for Art and Media, Brussels, 2019 (solo)As If – I Rock, Paper, Scissors, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2015 (solo)As If – II Flight of the Black Boxes, 24 Jorbagh, New Delhi, 2015 (solo)The Cinema of CAMP: Tales from the Networked Neighbourhood, Filmmaker festival and DOCVA, Milan, 2014Appeal for Alternatives, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Schmela Haus, Dusseldorf, 2011Reality Effects, Henie Onstad Art Centre, Oslo, 2008‘If we can’t get it Together’ Artists rethinking the (mal)function of Communities, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, 2008Broadcast Yourself, Artists interventions into Self-Broadcasting from the 1970’s, Cornerhouse, Manchester, 2008Broadcast Yourself, Artists interventions into Self-Broadcasting from the 1970’s, AV Festival, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, 2008Impossible India, Frankfurter Kunstverein, 2006Sensor-Census-Censor, Sarai, New Delhi, 2006Honorary Mention, Interactive Art, Ars Electronica, Linz, 2006Public, Art, Intervention, Khoj, New Delhi, 2006
KHIRKEEYAAN 2006-2015TV sets, CCTV cameras, microphones, video splitter, Rf modulator, XLR and coax cables. 7 episodes, 5 on show. Runtime various, Ed. of 5 + 2 AP
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KHIRKEEYAANCabling layout, wall drawing, Install view, As If – I Rock, paper, scissors, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2015
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KHIRKEEYAANInstall view, As If – I Rock, paper, scissors, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2015
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KHIRKEEYAANInstall view, CAMP: Beginnings, Argos Centre for Art and Media, Brussels, 2019
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KHIRKEEYAANInstall view, As If – II Flight of the Black Boxes, 24 Jorbagh, New Delhi, 2015
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KHIRKEEYAANInstall view, Broadcast Yourself, Artists interventions into Self-Broadcasting from the 1970’s, Cornerhouse, Manchester, 2008
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WINDSCREEN
Paper, steel wire and frame, wall fan2002
Ed. of 5 + 2 AP
Install view, As If – I Rock, paper, scissors, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2015Install view, As If – I Rock, paper, scissors, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2015
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2002Paper, steel wire and frame, wall fanEd. of 5 + 2 AP
Windscreen: A sculptural allegory about the difference between video and film.
CAMP has worked in many media, and these works talk to each other. Windscreen is Ashok’s first exhibited ‘artwork’. As an idea, it is a naughty poke at “video art”, made with paper and wind. But in its manifestation it becomes a physical experience of proto-video; how movement is captured, and subjects trapped. Video is seen as that which registers movement by sensing differences in force. Windscreen is made up of several hundred paper rectangles that are held up by air (created by a small fan). In this ‘up’ condition the viewer sees the screen, but if they move to the other side of the screen their body and movements block the air and the pixels drop, creating an ‘image’ of the viewer. We recreated this early work as a marker of ‘how we got here’. It bodes a playful understanding of technology, it involves the subject and viewer in its formation, has simplicity and primacy of materials.
Links:https://studio.camp/works/windscreen/
2001: https://studio.camp/resources/Windscreen_2001.mov 2014: https://studio.camp/resources/Windscreen.mov
Exhibition history:CAMP: Beginnings, Argos Center for Art and Media, Brussels, 2019 (solo)Could Have Beens, Ten Days, Six Nights, The Tanks, Tate Modern, London, 2017As If – I Rock, Paper, Scissors, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2015 (solo)As If – II Flight of the Black Boxes, 24 Jorbagh, New Delhi, 2015 (solo)Alert, New Wight Gallery, UCLA, 2002
WINDSCREEN
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WINDSCREENInstall view, As If – I Rock, paper, scissors, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2015
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WINDSCREENDetail, install view, Could Have Beens, Ten Days Six Nights, The Tanks, Tate Modern, London, 2017
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WINDSCREENInstall view, CAMP: Beginnings, Argos Centre for Art and Media, Brussels, 2019
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WINDSCREENInstall view, As If – II Flight of the Black Boxes, 24 Jorbagh, New Delhi, 2015
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COUNTRY OF THE SEA
Solar exposed cyanotype print on cotton fabric, 17 x 5 ft Ed. of 3 + 2 AP
2015
Install view, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2016
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In a remarkable Gujarati chart of the Gulf of Aden dated around 1810, we see a drawing of parallel Arabian and Somali coasts, heavily travelled by Gujarati sailors since the 17th century. The coasts in this map are crafted and detailed, and create the impression of a world populated on its edges by different civilisations, bordering and channelling the faraway movements of sailors and traders from India.
CAMP in collaboration with young artists from the Clark House Initiative presents a contemporary map of these seas, based on their 5-year project with Gujarati sailors in the Western Indian Ocean, from Kuwait to Mombasa. This is is an unusual sort of map that brings the coasts of India, Africa, Iran and the Arab states in dialogue with each other. Inspired by the chart from 1810 mentioned above, the coastlines now come closer together and evoke the cultural proximities and divides produced by these seas, so important to the city of Mumbai which also features prominently at one of its edges.
The map is 17 feet by 5 feet high and is produced using solar exposed cyanotype print. More than 100 cities and small ports from Khor al Zubair/ Basra to the Mozambique corridor from north-south, and from Mumbai to Berbera east-west, are marked on the map. But the shape of the map disorients an easy reading of this territory as the usual physical geography. It provokes an image of the sea as its own “country”, with frontier towns at its edges. The work establishes the materiality of the sea that we (some of us) see out of our windows in Mumbai, but whose other faraway edges we have lost awareness of. It brings these edges back into geological and cultural play, as if the pre-historic “breakaway” of the Indian landmass from Africa in what has been called Gondwanaland, was never a complete success.
Link:https://studio.camp/works/countryofthesea/
Exhibition history:Face Value, Transmediale, HKW Berlin, 2018Raster: Emerging from the Grid, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2016Villa Vassilieff - Beton Salon, Paris, 2016Transactions, Manifesta collateral exhibition, University of Zurich, 2016As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015 (solo)
COUNTRY OF THE SEA Solar exposed cyanotype print on cotton fabric17 x 5 ft approx., Ed. of 3 + 2 AP
2015
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COUNTRY OF THE SEADetail view
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COUNTRY OF THE SEAInstall view with Wharfage books in foreground, Face Value, Transmediale, HKW, Berlin, 2018
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COUNTRY OF THE SEAInstall view with The Boat-Modes in foreground, As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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THE BOAT-MODES
Set of 8 photographic prints on acrylic cruciforms suspended in the shape of the constellation Pleiades, 16 x 9 in each, Set of 8,
Ed. of 3 + 2 AP2012
Install view (partial), cruciforms, Documenta (13), Kassel, 2012
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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 phrase “Boat modes” has a practical use here, which is to express the peculiar and flexible ways in which these boats are manifest in the Western Indian Ocean. But it also has other possibilities; such as to follow Bruno Latour in asking a question “in a way that a specific kind of agency appears.” A matter of tone, or key. Or to create further paths from these boats’ continued expansion of categories such as “sovereign”, “pirate”, “container”, “free trade”, “money”, and “work” at such points where known maritime histories and economics seem to say: “End!”
Modes appear at the intersection of forces and environments, and are arranged here in the shape of the constellation Pleiades, or Thurayya in Gujarati and Arabic navigation maps. They accompany a film that takes us on a journey from the Gulf of Kutch in India to the UAE, to Somali ports, and back. The songs in the film were all found, married to the cell-phone videos that you see.
Link:
https://studio.camp/events/Documenta13/
Exhibition history:As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015Border Cultures Part II (work, labour), Art Gallery Windsor, 2014Freedom: Kunstpalais, Erlangen, 2013Documenta (13), 2012
THE BOAT-MODES Set of 8 photographic prints on acrylic cruciforms suspended in the shape of the constellation Pleiades, 16 x 9 in each, Set of 8, Ed. of 3 + 2 AP
2012
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THE BOAT-MODESInstall view (partial), cruciforms, Kunstpalais, Erlangen, 2013
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THE BOAT-MODESInstall view, cruciforms, Documenta (13), Kassel, 2012
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THE BOAT-MODESInstall view (detail), cruciforms, Documenta (13), Kassel, 2012
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THE BOAT-MODESInstall view (detail), cruciforms, Documenta (13), Kassel, 2012
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THE BOAT-MODESInstall view (partial), cruciforms, Documenta (13), Kassel, 2012
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THE BOAT-MODESInstall view, As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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THE BOAT-MODESInstall view, As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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THE ANNOTATED “GUJARAT AND THE SEA” EXHIBITION
Set of 22 frames of photographs and text layered under glass, 210 paper boats,Ed. of 3 + 2 AP
2011
Install view (partial), As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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An exhibition made of photographs of photographs of photographs, maps and other documents of a maritime exhibition organised in Gujarat, India.
In October 2010, a major conference and exhibition was organised in the port town of Mandvi in Kutch, India. The exhibition ‘Gujarat and the Sea’ was, as its curator put it, opportunistic. It made use of opportunities to access UK-based archives to bring about 80 maps, photographs, and objects, mostly printed as high-quality digital reproductions, back to within a stone’s throw of contemporary seafaring activity at Mandvi’s port.
A layered and unstable history could be seen in the materials of the show: notes in Gujarati on English pilot’s maps, scrawls in English on Gujarati lists, photos taken with or without “permission”. Its mode of reproduction, and its limited attempt at decolonizing maritime archives, offered an opportunity to the artists.
CAMP proposed to extend this exhibition, by photographing, annotating, cropping and layering “Gujarat and the Sea”, with the help of historians and amateurs working in the field, and through their own work on contemporary Gujarati seafaring activity as far-flung as Somalia and Iraq. This is then, exhibition as “relay”.
This work was originally produced for Against All Odds: A Contemporary Response to the Historiography of Archiving, Collecting, and Museums in India, held at the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi. It has since shown at Transmediale at HKW Berlin, VAC Moscow, Mapping Asia at Asia Art Archive Hong Kong, CAMP’s solo at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum Mumbai, Clark House Mumbai, among other venues.
Further information: https://studio.camp/events/GATS/
Exhibition and history:General Rehearsal, V-A-C, Moscow, 2018 Face Value, Transmediale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2018Traps for Troubadours, Clark House, Mumbai, 2012As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015 (solo)Against All Odds, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 2011
THE ANNOTATED “GUJARAT AND THE SEA” EXHIBITION Set of 22 frames of photographs and text layered under glass, 210 paper boats, Ed. of 3 + 2 AP
2011
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THE ANNOTATED “GUJARAT AND THE SEA” EXHIBITIONBeginning the sequence, a picture of Alan Villiers’ photograph of dhows in Kuwait in the early 20th century, as seen and photographed in Mandvi, Gujarat, India.Install view (partial), As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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THE ANNOTATED “GUJARAT AND THE SEA” EXHIBITIONLeft: Map of British Gas’ oil and gas explorations and pipelines in Gujarat. Right: Key to images, from the catalogue of the original “Gujarat and the Sea”exhibition (24 x 24 in) Install view (partial), As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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THE ANNOTATED “GUJARAT AND THE SEA” EXHIBITION“The island of Kathiawad” and some connections to it, over Van Keulen and De Marre’s map of Arabia and Gujarat, 1753.Install view (partial), As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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THE ANNOTATED “GUJARAT AND THE SEA” EXHIBITION(Left) British Admiralty map of Mozambique, 1824 with annotations by Edward Simpson. (Right) “Not just word of mouth...”, hand on wall hanging of a 1665 Gujarati “pothi” or sailing manual. Install view (partial), As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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THE ANNOTATED “GUJARAT AND THE SEA” EXHIBITION“The Sun sets over Surat”, camera flash on aquatint panorama, 1830Install view (partial), As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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THE ANNOTATED “GUJARAT AND THE SEA” EXHIBITIONInstall view (partial), Face Value, Transmediale, HKW, Berlin, 2018
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THE ANNOTATED “GUJARAT AND THE SEA” EXHIBITIONTriptych made from 16th century Kutchi navigation map with notes in English by Alexander Burnes and contemporary encounter of Kutchi boat with Portuguese warship (18 x 18 in x 3 in each). Install view (partial), As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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THE ANNOTATED “GUJARAT AND THE SEA” EXHIBITIONLeft: Water colour from Mandavee, 1867, overlaid with man in a bubu (18 x 18 in) Right: Diptych made from Boats on the Beach at Mandavee, 1869 with overlaid cell-phone stills (12 x 12 x 2 in) Install view (partial), As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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THE ANNOTATED “GUJARAT AND THE SEA” EXHIBITIONLeft: Alan Villiers’ photo of a “baggala” in Kuwait, 1938 with contemporary annotations. Right: Back of vahan in Jam Salaya. Install view, As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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THE ANNOTATED “GUJARAT AND THE SEA” EXHIBITIONTriptych showing a British made elevation of the coast of Surat, 1779, overlaid with images from a Dutch engraving of Surat, 1660.Install view (partial), As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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THE ANNOTATED “GUJARAT AND THE SEA” EXHIBITIONInstall view (partial), As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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WHARFAGE, THE BOOK
220 pages, Edition of 7502009
Dockworkers and Traders reading Wharfage publication. 2009, Sharjah Corniche
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CAMP’s project in Sharjah in 2009 consisted of two parallel pieces: Wharfage, a book containing two years of port records related to the Somali trade; and Radio Meena, four evenings of radio transmissions from the port in Sharjah.
The below text is from an abstract of a lecture given on the Wharfage project in 2010 at “Hydrarchy: Power and Resistance at Sea”, UCL, London. Unlike the explorer whose frontier is “where no one else has gone”, the wooden-ship-captain who says he goes “where no one else goes” also whispers, “anymore”, hinting that things change with time. In this story, Iraq was a destination fifteen years ago, as Somalia is today. Such horizons for “free trade” are produced by certain groups doing, openly, what others have deemed temporarily atleast, unprofitable. This takes skill and a capacity, a “power and resistance at sea”. At the same time, the orientation of ships and traders towards certain destinations has its “price”. How to deal with unexpected intimacies? Remember, Sara Ahmed wrote, that the words contingency and contact have the same root (Latin: contigere = to touch). Goats crowd the insides of boats, charcoal catches fire. Ethiopian discotheques, sinkings off Oman, and boardings by the US navy are recorded on Gujarati sailors’ cellphones. Even if the goods are all Chinese, one state “feels” another. So there is one ship here, which could be described as brutal, bottom-feeding, capitalism as usual. And then there is another one, which has a range of peculiar and persistent properties. It is: made of Malaysian timber, brought home in the monsoons, classified as a “sailing vessel”, a vigorous offspring of the traditional Arab “dhow” and Gujarati “vahan”, fed on cheap diesel from Iran and break-bulk cargo re-exported from the Emirates. These two ships tell us about the balance of forces between nation-states, tax-regimes, labour-pools and ecosystems, for ex. in the diagram below... a matrix that is nevertheless perturbed, excited, by each passing ship.
This work begins CAMP’s continuing friendship with the sailors from the Gulf of Kutch, and other workers in the UAE.
Links:https://studio.camp/projects/wharfage/Book: https://studio.camp/resources/wharfage.pdf
WHARFAGE, THE BOOK 220 pages, edition of 750 2009
WHARFAGE, THE BOOKSelect pages
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RADIO MEENA
13.5 W radio transmission over 4 days, Sharjah Creek2009
Reading and FM listening station, museum roof, Sharjah, 2009
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CAMP’s project in Sharjah in 2009 consisted of two parallel pieces: Wharfage, a book containing two years of port records related
to the Somali trade; and Radio Meena, four evenings of radio transmissions from the port in Sharjah, which broadcast in a 5+
kilometer radius songs, commentary, phone and ship radio conversations with ships in Salaya, in Bossaso and enroute, accounts
from Gujarati sailors, loaders from Dera Gazi Khan and NWFP in Pakistan, Sikh truckers, Iranian shopkeepers, Somali trading
agents. All of whom spoke Hindustani (Hindi+Urdu) as a common language of the port.
Radio Meena led to their 4-year collaboration on the feature film, From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf.
Link:https://studio.camp/projects/wharfage/
Video: https://studio.camp/resources/radiomeena.mp4
Exhibition history:As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015Sharjah Biennale XI, Sharjah, 2013
RADIO MEENA 13.5 W radio transmission over 4 days, Sharjah Creek
2009
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RADIO MEENAFM broadcast station on MSV Nazre Karam, Shrarjah Corniche, 2009
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RADIO MEENAFM listening station, Shrarjah Corniche, 2009
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RADIO MEENAListeners at the entrance to the Iranian souk about a kilometer away, 2009
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RADIO MEENAInstall view, As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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DESTUFFING MATRIX
4 channel HDV, 8 minEd. of 3 + 2 AP
2012
Panoramic view, Pepper House,Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 2012
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(It’s not so much that all that is solid melts into air, but rather that there are boxes within boxes… )
Ports and cities have been shy of each other throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Suddenly they make a joint appearance, new container terminal facing the waterfront, sharing their most visible parts. Meanwhile thousands of other pieces of the port – goods, workers, customs seals, excel sheets – are scattered across a “hinterland”, connected by bridge and wire, and surrounded by fences.
What could be an image of this fractured landscape? The closest available rendering is the “transparent port” (or India’s first e-port, as the website of Cochin port trust proclaims). A port that, like its physical twin, makes things appear in proper columns, and counts rows of containers stuffed, bills paid, and ships expected or berthing. Boxes resist images, but also offer an invitation to the curious. CAMP’s work here, filmed on location in Container Freight Stations in Kochi, follows from such a curiosity.
Links:https://studio.camp/works/destuffingmatrixPreview link to 4-channel comoposite view: https://studio.camp/resources/destuffing_ASIF_composite_export.mp4Preview link to 4x3-channel comoposite view: https://studio.camp/resources/DESTUFFING_KOCHI_composite_preview_CAMP.mp4
Exhibition history:After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India 1947/1997, Queens Museum, New York, 2015Redefine: Multiple Perspectives and Possibilities in Network Era, Times Museum, Guangzhou, 2015
As If – II, I Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 2012
DESTUFFING MATRIX 4 channel HDV, 8 minEd. of 3 + 2 AP
2012
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DESTUFFING MATRIXInstall view, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 2012
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DESTUFFING MATRIXInstall view, Queens Museum, New York, 2015
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DESTUFFING MATRIXInstall view, As If – II, I Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2015
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HD. 2 - channel installation, 20 min, Cantonese, MandarinFilmed in Guangzhou at the Zhuhai International Container Terminal
Ed. of 3 + AP 2015
MEN-AT-WORK WITH BOXES IN STEREO
Install view, Times Museum, Guangzhou, 2015
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The crane operator and longshoreman seem to have disappeared.
In this “forgotten space” of the ocean (that channels 90% of global trade), their absence, along with the grime and buzz of the port city has been mourned, there have even been requiems. But they exist, countless of them, their contracted hand-eye and body workings rendered tiny and near-invisible against the backdrop of the lego-land image of the hard to reach container port.
CAMP’s work here, filmed on location at the Zhuhai International Container Terminal, Gaolan on the Pearl River Delta offers “a day in the life of” look at what can be seen; of both the systems-view and workers-view of that seemingly automated movement of boxes.
With the participation of Jingbin Liu, Zhiyu Fang, Jiefeng Zhao, Wuyi Lin, Zedong Wang, Guoming Liang and others. Many thanks to Xiaofei Mo and Jianmin Chen.
Links:
https://studio.camp/works/menatwork
Men-at Work with Boxes in Stereo (composite preview) (2015): https://studio.camp/resources/Men_at_Work_with_Boxes_in_Stereo_2channel.mp4
Exhibition history:Redefine: Multiple Perspectives and Possibilities in Network Era, Times Museum, Guangzhou, 2015
MEN-AT-WORK WITH BOXES IN STEREO HD. 2 - channel installation, 20 min, Cantonese, Mandarin
Filmed in Guangzhou at the Zhuhai International Container TerminalEd. of 3 + AP
2015
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MEN-AT-WORK WITH BOXES IN STEREOComposite view, film stills
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A PASSAGE THROUGH PASSAGES: ON ROADS IN SOUTH ASIA, 2019
At CAMP: Ashok Sukumaran, Faiza Ahmad Khan, Shaina Anand, Simpreet Singh, Zinnia Ambapardiwala, Zulekha SayyedSound Design: Venkatesh Iyer, GFX: Mubashir Niyaz, Color Correction: Dwani Guru, Print: Gurpreet Kaur
Camera: Ali Rizvi, Ashok Sukumaran, Deborah Menezes, Faiza Ahmad Khan, Iffat Fatima, LTTE camera persons, Pooja Sharma, Raju Biswas, Shaina Anand, Sunil Kumar, Tanmay Agarwal, Tommaso Sbriccoli.
Actors: Nagpur: Hidayat Sami as Novelist, Vishrut Landge as Highways consultant, Shabnam Vadhera as Gadkari’s Neighbour
Ratlam: Sameera Iyengar as Bureaucrat, Ashok Sukumaran as Researcher, Udit Parashar as Shopkeeper, Indrani Misra as Financial Analyst, Govind Kushwaha as Toll Collector, Bhagat Singh as Supervisor
Bhuj: Shabnam Vadhera as Gandhian, Edward Simpson as Anthropologist, Ishaque H Khalifa as Ex-miner, Rana Singh Sodha as Security Guard, Kumbhaji Hamir Pragji as Hamir Bhai, Hamir Pragji Jadeja as Hamir Bhai’s son, Bhagu Prithvirajsinh Jadeja as Bhagu, Frankfinn Institute Trainee as Tour Guide. Aftershocks: The Rough Guide to Democracy footage courtesy Rakesh Sharma.
Thar: Mohammed Iqbal Rahmo as Tailor, Mustafa Khan as Anthropologist, Shaina Anand as Development Specialist, Hidayat Sami as Editor, Allah Dino Shah as Patel of Rilo Rind, Ayoub Memon as Local Historian, Pratap Meghwal as Activist from Gorano, Ashok Sukumaran as Speculator, Dost Mohammed Halepota as Land Owner.
Sri Lanka: Chandrakagupta Thenuwara as Artist, Vijay Nagaraj as Political Economist, Indrani Misra as Journalist, Vindhya Buthpitiya as Anthropologist, Shrujana Sridhar as Photographer, Sameera Iyengar as Tourist, Simpreet Singh as Civil Engineer, Joshua Thomas as Student, Balas Pillai as VC Jaffna University, Ahilan Kadrigamar as Political Economist, Deborrah Menezes as Anthropologist, Imparaj as RDA Engineer, Luke Heslop as Anthropologist, Shaina Anand as Filmmaker, Tamil Eelam Police as Policeman. Footage archive from the film The Other Side of Peace, 2005 courtesy Iffat Fatima.
Maldives: Luke Heslop as Anthropologist, Joshua Thomas as Biker, Shrujana Sridhar as Lubna Hawwa, Ashok Sukumaran as Environmentalist, Bikers, Waail Robbey, Nafiu De Yeste, Sarre De Yeste, Shinaaz, Saadhi
Thanks: Ahilan Kadrigamar, Baby Narayan More, Gillean Dickie, Iffat Fatima, Isabella Simpson, Jan Gerber, Jan Ramesh de Saram, Khalid Chauhan, Nada Raza, NatashaGinwala, Sairaj Patil, Sameep Padora, Sandeep Mhatre, Sharmini Perera, Siddhant Karnick, Srinivas Chokkakula, Subhadra Anand.
Part of THE ROADS PROJECT: On roads and the politics of thought in South Asia, a 5-year long project in partnership with Edward Simpson, SOAS, supported by the European Research Council (ERC).
PROJECT CREDITS
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A PHOTOGENETIC LINE, 2019Commissioned for the Chennai Photo Biennale 2019, Fauna of Mirrors, curated by N. PushamalaSupported by The Hindu. Thanks Mukund Padmanabhan, Jacob P., Prashant Nakwe and everyone at The Hindu’s Photo LibraryIn Bombay: Gurpreet Kaur, Amol Patil
IN CAMERAS RES, 2019Software: Jan GerberDe Appel production team: Lucie von Eugen, Charlie Rosa Jansen, Liza Nijhuis Actors: Sjoerd Bartlema, Lu KlassenThanks Rachael Rakes, Niels Van Tomme, Maaike Lauwaert, Tom Makkes, Abhishek Pradhan, Finbar van Wijk and Sjoerd Tim (Sjaft)
MATRIX, 2017Commissioned by the Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017Virtual girl in window: Anna Viehoff808 church bells: Sneha Khanwalkar and Mark FulgadoScreens: Micheal Klier, Michael Anderson (film clips), Leo Strauss(lyrics), Stadtarchiv and StadtTheater (images from the 1956 opening)Thanks: Britta Peters, Jan Bockholt, Kasper König Christoph Schäfer
THE COUNTRY OF THE SEA, 2015Commissioned by Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum for As If II – The Country of the Sea.CAMP with Anuj Daga, Shunya collective and Clark House Initiative
FOUR-LETTER FILM, 2015/2017/2019Balaji Mohan, NILA, for drawings and fabrication at 24 Jorbagh (2015)Delhi Big Soda for fabrication at Tate Modern, London (2017)Stijn Schiffeleers for fabrication at Argos, Brussels (2019)
FROM GULF TO GULF TO GULF, 2013Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation Production Program 2010 with support from Foundation for Arts Initiatives, Documenta (13) curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Camera and sound: Siddik Umar Sanghar, Mrinal Desai, Junas Salemamad Bhagad, Ashok Sukumaran, Shaina Anand, Sulaiman Haroon Raja, Jabbar Hassan Chingda, Ismail Ghandhar, Mohammed Rafik, Sulaiman Wahab Sumbhania, Abdul Majid Chauhan, Mehboob Abbas Sanghar, Hakimuddin Lilyawala, and the anonymous creators of music videos across many boats and years.Editing: Sreya Chatterjee, Sound post production: Amala Popuri
PROJECT CREDITS
194
THE BOAT MODES, 2012Co-commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation and Documenta (13)Cruciform prints: Prerna Bishnoi, Sindhu Thirumalaisamy, Ashok SukumaranVideo and sound editing: Shaina Anand, Sreya Chatterjee
DESTUFFING MATRIX, 2012–2015Produced for the Kochi-Muziris Biennial 2012, curated by Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas KomuCamera: Pooja SharmaEditing: Samarth Dixit, Sreya Chatterjee
THE ANNOTATED “GUJARAT AND THE SEA” EXHIBITION, 2011Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran, Iyesha Geeth AbbasInstallation design: Samir Parker
THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND, AND OTHER STORIES, 2011Commissioned for the Folkestone Triennial 2011, curated by Andrea SchliekerShaina Anand, Iyesha Geeth Abbas, Ashok Sukumaran and Guy Mannes-AbbottWith: The National Coastwatch Institution, FolkestoneSound design: Mukul Patel
THE RADIA TAP(E)S ACT I & ACT II, 2011–2012Shaina Anand, Zinnia Ambapardiwala, Sanjay Bhangar, Ashok Sukumaran
AL JAAR QABLA AL DAAR (THE NEIGHBOUR BEFORE THE HOUSE), 2009–2011Project commissioned by the Jerusalem Show, 2009, curated by Jack Persekian and Nina MontmannFilm produced in 2011 for Sharjah Biennale X, curated by Rasha SaltiIn Jerusalem/ Al Quds: Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran, Nida Ghouse, Mahmoud Jiddah, Shereen Barakat and Mahasen Nasser-EldinEditing: Aarthi Parthasarthy, Shaina Anand
RADIO MEENA, 2009Produced for the 9th Sharjah Biennial, 2009. As part of the program “Past of the Coming Days”, curated by Tarek Abou el FetouhRadio jockeys: Hakimuddiun Lilyawalla, Ryan D’ SouzaRadio engineers: Ashok Sukumaran, Shuaib P.Host ship: MSV Nazare Karam
PROJECT CREDITS
195
WHARFAGE, THE BOOK, 2009Produced for the 9th Sharjah Biennial, 2009. As part of the program “Past of the Coming Days”, curated by Tarek Abou el FetouhDatabase software: Sanjay Bhangar, Book editors: Ashok Sukumaran, Nida Ghouse, Shaina AnandBook design: Europa, LondonPrinted at: Spenta Multimedia, Bombay
CCTV SOCIAL: CAPITAL CIRCUS AND COLD CLINIC, 2008With Chris Clarke, Marissa Draper,Ultimate Holding Company, Livewire, CornerhouseCommissioned by Cornerhouse and Asian Triennial Manchester 08, curated by Kathy Rae HuffmanPost production commissioned by Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Norway for Reality Effects curated by Tone Hansen
KHIRKEEYAAN, 2008With Aastha Chauhan, Gaurav ChandelyaThanks: Anita Dube, Tanmoy Sarkar, Manoj VP, Hemant Sreekumar, Pooja Sood, KHOJ, Delhi
The CAMP studio in Bombay, and the online archive Pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) co-initiated by CAMP is supported by FfAI (Foundation for Arts Initiatives)
Dossier compiled by Experimenter, Kolkata, with thanks to Vidhi Todi and Amman Hussain.
PROJECT CREDITS
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CAMP (Est. 2007)
Awards: 2014 Best Film, New View Award, Olhar de Cinema, Curitiba 2013 Special Mention, International Competition, FID, Marseille 2009 Jury Main Award, Sharjah Biennial 2008 Honorary Mention, Digital Communities, Prix Ars Electronica 2007 Golden Nica: Interactive Art, Prix Ars Electronica (Ashok Sukumaran) 2007 Honorary Mention: Interactive Art, Prix Ars Electronica (Shaina Anand) 2006 UNESCO Digital Arts Award (Ashok Sukumaran).
Nominations: 2013 Shortlist, Skoda Prize for Indian Contemporary Art 2010 International Award for Participatory Art (Shaina Anand) 2010 Asia Art Award (Ashok Sukumaran)
Exhibitions: 2020Collections display, Media Networks, Tate Modern, London A Passage Through Passages, Brunei Gallery, SOAS, LondonFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Punto De Vista, International Documentary Festival of Navarra
2019CAMP: Beginnings, Argos Centre for Art and Media, Brussels (solo)City Housing in a Cultural Matrix, Chicago Architecture Biennale, ChicagoFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Body Building, Ishara Art Foundation, DubaiA Photogenetic Line, Experimenter - Hindustan Road, Kolkata (solo)In Cameras Res, De Appel, Amsterdam (solo)CCTV TV: An evening with CAMP, LIMA, AmsterdamA Photogenetic Line, Chennai Photo Biennale, Chennai.
CV
197
2018From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, 40 Films: An inventory of Contemporary Cinema, Festival des Trois Continents, NantesThe New Medium III: Multi-Screen Cinema, Mumbai Film Festival, PVR ECX CitiMall, Andheri, Mumbai (curation)From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, An Oceanic Feeling, Len Lye Center Cinema, New PlymouthShape Recognition, University of Chicago, ChicagoThe Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” Exhibition, General Rehearsal, V-A-C, MoscowFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Lahore Biennale 01, Alhamra Art Center, LahoreFwd: Re: Archive, Max Mueller Bhavan and G5A, Mumbai (host)From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, The Ocean After Nature, The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, New York2020, Horniman Circle Garden, MumbaiFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Face Value, Transmediale, HKW, Berlin, 2018Country of the Sea, Face Value, Transmediale, HKW, Berlin, 2018Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar (The Neighbour before the House), Savvy Contemporary, BerlinCCTV Landscape from Moulali-Entally, Gem Cinema, Kolkata.
2017 Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar (The Neighbour before the House), Jerusalem Lives (Tahya Al Quds), Palestinian Museum, Birzeit CCTV Landscape from Lower Parel, MAMI Film Festival, Mumbai The New Medium II, Footage Films, MAMI Film Festival, Mumbai (curation)Matrix, Skulptur Projekte Münster, Münster From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Sekula beyond Sekula – Okeanos, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, TBA21, Vienna Camera Obscura, Tate Modern, London Could Have Beens, BMW Tate Live Exhibition: Ten Days Six Nights, Tate Modern, London Hangar for the Passerby, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Noida Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar (The Neighbour before the House), Palestine: Territory, Memory, Projections, Mucem, Marseille From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, The Ocean After Nature, Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide, Grossman Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, London and Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Water in Indian Cinema, King’s College, London From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Keimena, Documenta 14
CV
198
2016The Country of the Sea, Raster – Emerging from the grid, Experimenter, KolkataThe New Medium I, MAMI Film Festival, Mumbai (curation)The Country of the Sea, Hold, and From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Transactions, Manifesta Parallel Exhibition, University of Zurich From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, The Ocean After Nature, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Mosaic Rooms, London
2015 Pad.ma At The Reina Sofa, The Archives of the Commons, Madrid From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Destuffing Matrix, After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India 1947/1997, Queens Museum, New York As if – tV, Clark House Initiative, Mumbai (solo) As If – IV Night for Day, Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai (solo) As If – III Country of the Sea, Dr. Bhau Dhaji Lad Museum, Mumbai (solo) As If – II Flight of the Black Boxes, 24 Jorbagh, New Delhi (solo) As If – I Rock, Paper, Scissors, Experimenter, Kolkata (solo) From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Mobile M+: Moving Images, M+, Hong Kong.Men-at-Work with Boxes In Stereo, Redefine: Multiple Perspectives and Possibilities in Network Era, Times Museum, Guangzhou.
2014From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Shanghai BiennaleFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Rupert, VilniusFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Porto Post DocAl Jaar Qabla Al Daar (The Neighbour before the House), Capital Circus, Unravelling Documentarism, HelsinkiRadia Tap(e)s Act I & II, Nirankusha Fearless Speak, BangaloreFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, ParisFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Verzio, BudapestCopyright this!, Eros, Parasite, HongkongCapital Circus, Lines and Nodes, Anthology Film Archives, New YorkThe Annotated Gujarat and the Sea Exhibition, Mapping Asia, Asia Art Archive, HongkongHum Logos, From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Capital Circus,Flaherty at MoMA, New YorkModern Mondays, MoMA, New YorkSelected work and screenings, Flaherty Seminar, New York
CV
199
Unreliable Narrators, From Stings to Leaks to Citizen Vigilantes, Berlin Documentary Forum, HKWDescendent, Spaghetti Harvest, Project 88, MumbaiFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Olhar de Cinema, CurutibaWorking In and Out of the Archive with Pad.ma, Gallery TPW (co-curation), TorontoFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Images Festival TorontoFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Ann Arbor Film FestivalTales From the Networked Neighbourhood, The Cinema of Camp, 5 Films at Palestrina Cinema, Milan Pleasure, A Block Study, Art Dubai (publication launch)From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, March Meeting, SharjahFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, FICUNAM MexicoThe Boat-Modes, Border Cultures Part II (work, labour), Art Gallery WindsorThe Annotated Gujarat and the Sea Exhibition, Descendent Traps for Troubadours, Clark House, MumbaiFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Dhaka Art Summit
2013From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Migrating Forms Film Festival, New YorkFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar, Cinema Project, Portland Cork Film Festival, IrelandPleasure A, Block Study, Serpentine Galleries, London (publication launch)From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Viennale, Vienna International Film FestivalFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Doc Lisboa, LisbonFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Athens Avant-Garde Film FestivalFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Underdox, MunichFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, BFI London Film FestivalThe Radia Tap(e)s: Act I & Act II, Citizen-Artist, Forms of Address, Chemould Prescott Road, MumbaiCCTV Social, Cold Clinic, Capital Circus, Bunny Smash, Design to Touch the World, Museum of Contemporary Art, TokyoThe Country of the Blind, and Other Stories Pekham Artists Moving Image, The Sunday Painter, LondonFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Festival Internationale de Cinema (FID), MarseilleFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Le Pont, Museum of Contemporary Art, MarseilleThe Boat-Modes Freedom, Kunstpalais, ErlangenFrom Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, Sharjah Biennale XITwo Stages of Invention, The Skoda Prize Show (shortlist), National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (solo)
CV
200
2012Destuffing Matrix, Kochi-Muziris BiennaleThe Radia Tap(e)s: Act I & Act II, Gwangju Biennale 9Pad.ma, Afghan Films, Documenta (13), KabulThe Boat-Modes, Documenta (13), KasselPad.ma, Afghan Films, Documenta (13), KasselPad.ma, Archive Practicum, Seminar and workshop with Afghan Films, Documenta (13), KabulThe Radia Tap(e)s: Act I & Act II, New Museum Triennale, Ungovernables, New York
2011Pad.ma Tours and Travels, Trondheim Center for Contemporary Art (solo) Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar (The Neighbour before the House), The Matter Within, Yerba Buena Center for Art, San FranciscoThe City is a Constantly Burning Bonfire, Cubbit, London (Ashok Sukumaran) Two Stages of Invention, Experimenter, Kolkata (solo) The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories, Folkestone TriennialKhirkeeyaan, Appeal for Alternatives, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Schmela Haus, Dusseldorf (Shaina Anand)Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar (The Neighbour before the House), Sharjah Biennale XThe Annotated Gujarat and the Sea Exhibition, Against All Odds, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi Lossfulness, Indian Highway IV, MAXXI, Rome
2010CCTV Social: Cold Clinic, The Second Order, Space Hamilton, SeoulAl Jaar Qabla Al Daar (The Neighbour before the House), Liverpool Biennial, City StatesDon’t Wait for the Archive 2, Speak, Memory, Townhouse Gallery, CairoDon’t Wait for the Archive: Archiving Practices and Futures of the Image, Home Works V, BeirutAsia Art Award Forum Exhibition, SOMA Museum of Art, Seoul (Ashok Sukumaran)Anisotropics, Gallery MUU, Helsinki (solo)Lossfulness, Indian Highway III, MAC, Lyon
2009The Edgware Road Project, Serpentine Galleries, London (2009-2013) Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar (The Neighbour before the House), The Jerusalem Show, JerusalemEl nuevo signo, Autonomies of Disagreement, Transitio-Mx, Mexico City, (Ashok Sukumaran)
CV
201
Concrete Culture, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney (Ashok Sukumaran) Wharfage, Radio Meena, Sharjah Biennial IXLossfulness, Indian Highway II, Astrup Fearnly Museum, OsloThe Neighbour, P-3, and the Arts Catalyst, London (Ashok Sukumaran)
2008‘If we can’t get it Together’ Artists rethinking the (mal)function of Communities Khirkeeyaan, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (Shaina Anand)Lossfulness, Indian Highway, Serpentine Galleries, London Motornama Roshanara 48*C Public, Ecology, Art, New Delhi Cold Clinic, The Impossible Prison, Galleries of Justice, The Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham (Shaina Anand)Dictionary of War, Taipei Biennale (Shaina Anand)CCTV Social, Cold Clinic, Capital Circus, Reality Effects, Henie Onstad Art Centre, Oslo (Shaina Anand)CCTV Social, What do you Want? Asian Triennial Manchester, Cornerhouse (Shaina Anand)Khirkeeyaan, Broadcast Yourself, Artists interventions into Self-Broadcasting from the 1970’s, Cornerhouse Manchester (Shaina Anand)Khirkeeyaan, Broadcast Yourself, Artists interventions into Self-Broadcasting from the 1970’s, AV Festival, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle (Shaina Anand)Sept Soirees, Dakar Biennale-OffShelter, Visibility, Love, Cleotronica Festival, Alexandria Contemporary Art Forum
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