“Of Blind Men and Elephants Show” in Dubai

The Cinemas Project is part of a group show that is on at the The Empty Quarter Gallery in Dubai. The show is curated by the ever-awesome Hester Keijser (one half of Keijser & Beierle and of Mrs. Deane blog fame) and features the works of Mahesh Shantaram, Priya Kambli, Michael Bühler-Rose, Neil Chowdhury, Vidisha Saini and myself.

The show is on from June 14 - July 31, 2011 so please check it out if you happen to be in Dubai!

Here is an excerpt from the exhibition note:

Anyone attempting to offer a comprehensive survey of contemporary Indian photography will soon resemble the mythical blind men who were unable to comprehend the entire form of the elephant. The vast Indian subcontinent simply defies an all-embracing view, and can only be celebrated in its dazzling, kaleidoscopic plurality of visions. 

Like the blind men, who ultimately rely on communicating to one another their tales of the same beast if they ever want to arrive at any kind of insight, so do we rely on the many stories told of India by the photographers in this group show. Each of them offers the viewer an intuition of the mutable, living entity that is India, a country and culture that exists most of all in our imagination.

To see some images fromt he show, click here. Press release here. A review here. A short note by the curator here.

Here is a small selection of my images featured in the show:

“This Is Not That” show

If anyone happens to be in Paris, we have a group show of ten photographers from India being hosted by the Duboys Gallery till the 19th of June.

The show is curated by Dominique Charlet and Fabien Charuau; and the photographers showing their work are Binu Bhaskar, Brijesh Patel, Dhruv Dhawan, Fabien Charuau, Pradeep Dalal, Swapan Parekh, Soham Gupta, Mahesh Shantaram, Neil Chowdhury and myself. I will be showing images from my Cinemas Project series for the first time and it's quite exciting to be part of a show with several photographers whose work I admire and respect.

A friend who visited the gallery last week was nice enough to take a partial installation shot for me...

And here are a few shots from the opening, courtesy the gallery (you can see the whole set here)...

PUBLIC 40: Screens

Was invited to make a contribution to the 40th issue of PUBLIC (a journal of 'Art, Culture & Idea's published by the Goldfarb Centre for Fine Arts in York University, Toronto) which went by the title: Screens. They featured the auditorium image from Maratha Mandir below. Do check out the journal if you get a chance to, there are some interesting texts and images/artworks that interrogate and investigate the shifting nature of screens themselves as well as their influence in changing—and often conflating—the "public" and "private" spheres.

From the editorial note:

"PUBLIC 40: Screens features twenty artists, curators and researchers who investigate and respond to new spaces of viewing and changing patterns of consumption —from Quebec to Palestine, from streets to galleries— with a variety of aesthetic, technological and distribution tactics. From Kelly Mark’s The Kiss to Elaine Ho and Sean Smith’s project responding to the Beijing Olympics, from Bruno Lessard’s essay about Robert Lepage’s Le Moulin à images to Holly Lewis’s "Wars of Air and Electricity," Screens is dedicated to the ways screens are used, viewed, imagined, placed, and made worldwide."

I was particularly taken by an image from Canadian artist Kelly Mark's installation The Kiss, which I have taken the liberty to copy and paste below.

Kelly Mark, The Kiss (2007)

On her website Kelly writes: "The light source for this work was created by simply recording the cast light of a gang bang scene in a hard core porn film as it bathed my apartment wall while viewing. No image or sound was captured only the reflected light. The porn genre tends to be fairly routine and pragmatic in terms of editing, therefore the resulting glow is steady and rhythmic with few camera changes but with quickening pulses of colour...mainly pinks, oranges and red hues."

I really love it.

It's one of those images where I'm sure that you don't really need the text at all, the caption itself, being so evocative, does a lot of the work. And yet, some people would like to know this. The artist herself clearly believes that it is important to know this. It is always interesting to think about just how 'context', such as the kind Kelly has provided, changes the way you read and experience an image. Personally, I constantly battle with myself as to whether it is necessary to put contextual information beside a particular image, because sometimes context can override the subjective reaction a viewer has with the image; and yet, often it is so important to know why/where/whom/what/how.

It's also perhaps worth thinking about titles/captions that reference other titles/cations and how artists can use that to not merely reference but 'update' images to their cultural time and place. With regards to Kelly Mark's work, Gustav Klimt's The Kiss comes to mind:

Gustav Klimt, The Kiss (1908)

Ah, convergences.

Cinemas Project in MARG

The Cinemas Project was featured in the March edition of Marg magazine, the theme of which is Indian Cinema. Many, many thanks to Erika Balsom, who has written the perfect text given the constraints of space in such a format.

     Auditorium, Capitol Cinema, Mumbai

See if you get a chance to purchase the issue, which is titled "Being Here, Now: Insights into Indian Cinema." Shanay Jhaveri, whose new book "Outsider Films on India 1950-1990" has just been published, has done a wonderful job of guest editing this issue. Some of the other artists/practitioners/researchers/writers featured in the magazine are Ashim Ahluwalia, Shirely Abraham, Moinak Biswas, Kaushik Bhaumik, Raqs Media Collective, Rachel Dwyer, Shumona Goel and Dale Cannedy Azim, Amar Kanwar, Amit Madheshiya, Benjamin Mercer and Kaunteya Shah.  

Michel de Certeau and the presence of absence

Was it fate? I remember the marvelous Shelburne Museum in Vermontwhere, in thirty-five houses of a reconstructed village, all the signs, tools and products of nineteenth-century everyday life teem; everything, from cooking utensils and pharmaceutical goods to weaving instruments, toilet articles, and children’s toys can be found in profusion. The display includes innumerable familiar objects, polished, deformed, or made more beautiful by long use; everywhere there are as well the marks of the active hands and laboring or patient bodies for which these things composed the daily circuits, the fascinating presence of absences whose traces were everywhere. At least this village full of abandoned and salvaged objects drew one’s attention, through them, to the ordered murmurs of a hundred past or possible villages, and by means of these imbricated traces one began to dream of countless combinations of existences.

- Michel de Certeau

Memorable passage from The Practice of Everyday Life.

Cinema City Goes to Berlin

Happy to be part of Madhushree Datta's paltan that is heading to the Berlinale this year.

If anyone finds themselves in Berlin from the 11th to the 21st of February, please go checkout "Cinema City", which is a group show that Madhu has curated.

"Cinema City is a project to document, archive and re-read the cinema producing cities through images and narratives within cinema and its impacts and manifestations in the lived world; involving inter-disciplinary and collaborative research, pedagogy and art and media productions."

The Cinemas Project will be featured as an installation at the Delphi Filmpalastam. Amruta Sakalkar has  designed a lovely little two-seater cinema hall in which the images will be presented. Thanks to Madhu, Kausik and the folks at KRVIA and Majlis for putting it all together.

Here is a list of the people that are exhibiting/screening their work:

The Western Suburb: Installation on Sweatshops of Cinema (Avijit
Mukul Kishore, Mamta Murthy, Rikhav Desai & Found Footage
Archive of Majlis); Cinema City Lived: Book of Spatial and Textual
Cartography (Design Cell, KRVIA; Text: Hansa Thapliyal, Design:
Ankit Bhargav); Phantom Lady on Light Boxes: Performance Photography
(Pushpamala N); The Cinemas Project: Photo Art on Single
Screen Cinemas (Zubin Pastakia, Design: Amruta Sakalkar); Bioscope:
Cinema-City-Modernity Dateline (Kausik Mukhopadhyay);
Calendar Gala: Iconography in 20th Century (Art Works by Multiple
Artists, Research: Shikha Pandey); Pila House: Interactive Computer
Archive (Rohan Shivkumar and Design Cell, KRVIA; Software Design:
Thatzit)

Films:
Certified Universal (Avijit Mukul Kishore, India 2009, SD, 15’); Dark
Room (Renu Savant, India 2009, SD, 10’); Have You Dreamt Cinema?
(Hansa Thapliyal, India 2009, SD, 16’); Sin City (Srikant Agawane,
India 2009, SD, 16’)

Visual Designer Cinema City: Kausik Muklhopadhyay

Creative Director and Curator Cinema City: Madhusree Dutta

Lens Culture

So glad that The Cinemas Project is featured in the latest volume of Lens Culture.

From their website:

Discover new photography from China, Australia, Cuba, India, the US, Canada, England, South Korea, and Brazil. This volume also includes new photobook reviews, a great video interview with UK photographer Simon Roberts, and more. So, settle in with a cup of good coffee, put your feet up, and enjoy!

(Remember to hit the "slideshow" button for larger images in all the series)

ET Interview

The Economic Times featured the Cinemas Project last weekend and did a little Q&A session with me. The web version seems unedited and has a few errors (NB: I wouldn't call myself an NYU alumnus; and it is a "knotted relationality" not "knotted rationality" between past and present ). 


Check it out here if you're interested. 

Lens Culture Awards

The results of the first annual Lens Culture International Exposure Awards were just announced.

For about four years now, Lens Culture has been an invaluable repository of international photography as well as a resource for insightful essays, interviews and analysis.

I was quite happy to be one of the 25 photographers who received an "Honorable Mention Award" (in the portfolio category) on their website. I had sent in a selection from the Cinemas Project series.

You can find the other photographers that are featured (and links to their websites) here.

Cinema Halls Update

I have updated the Cinemas Project page on the website with images made in the last year and a half. Do take a look.

I've been photographing cinema halls in Bombay/Mumbai for about 3 years now. As always, feedback, comments and questions are welcomed.

A small selection below: