SHAINA ANAND
Filmmaker and Artist, CAMP, Mumbai
ABSTRACT
This artist talk illustrates the technical and formal processes made visible through an evolving series of video and filmmaking experiments by members of the collaborative studio CAMP, whose interests lie in both the production and distribution of images, and how these two things may be connected. In a practice born out of a non-alienated, hands-dirtying, sparks-flying intimacy with technology; both hard and soft, analog and digital, sandboxed or open, their early system interventionist and inventive works attempt 'could have beens' across the disciplines of cinema, anthropology, public art and archiving. They suggest that while subjects, technology and authors each have unique properties, they could be thought of as equally powerful, equally fragile, and could also exchange places resulting in a devolution or transference of roles that produce modified landscapes and new epistemologies - discursively, psychologically, symbolically, politically, physically or otherwise.
Black boxes are entered, rewired or repurposed in ludic, autonomous and often parasitical ways. Household TV sets and CCTV cameras are coupled in a New Delhi neighbourhood, members of the public enter CCTV control rooms in the UK to look at a second city. A film is made from 206 existing cameras in the largest mall in Europe by multiplying provisions in the data protection act. Nearby coast watchers film through their telescopes, whilst residents in Jerusalem turn testimonies into personal geographies filmed remotely from their rooftops. Cinema halls in Mumbai become room-sized camera obscuras again. And videos abundance, its materiality and historicity, its potential and reserve and its formal properties are collectively cared for from kernel to keyword, code to content, in sustainable future oriented online platforms.
BIO
Shaina Anand (b. 1975) is a filmmaker and artist who has been working independently in film and video since 2001, and since 2007 as CAMP, a Mumbai-based studio for transdisciplinary media practices, which she co-founded with Ashok Sukumaran. CAMP's provocative work in video and film, electronic media and public art forms over the past decade have shown how deep technical experimentation and artistic form can meet while extracting new qualities and experiences from contemporary life and materials. Their artistic work has been exhibited internationally, including at film venues such as the Flaherty seminar, the BFI London Film Festival, the Viennale and Anthology Film Archives, and in art contexts such as the Biennials of Liverpool (2009), Sharjah (2009, 2011, 2013), Kochi-Muziris, (2012), Gwangju, (2012), Taipei (2008) and Shanghai (2014), Lahore (2018), the Tate Modern, MoMA and Ars Electronica, Documenta 13 in Kassel and Kabul, the Kiemena project at Documenta 14, and the 2017 edition of the Skulptur Projekte Münster. From their home base in Chuim village, Mumbai they run the online archives https://Pad.ma and https://Indiancine.ma, and the community space R and R, among other activities including their long-running rooftop cinema. Shaina is also founding trustee of The Indian Cinema Foundation and curator of THE NEW MEDIUM, at MAMI Film Festival.
