Review for VAICA festival

published in Art India, January 2020

A Record of the Changing World

Anuj Daga discusses some of the videos he sees at the VAICA festival.

Even though the moving image format has been frequently used by visual artists in contemporary art-making, one does not find many public archives or exhibitions planned around video art in India. The VAICA (Video Art by Indian Contemporary Artists) festival rightfully fills this void and hopes to make video works accessible to anyone interested in looking at experiments within the medium. Artist Bharati Kapadia and documentary filmmaker Chandita Mukherjee have brought together 67 video works by 35 contemporary artists practising in different idioms across India. Distributed over the five Saturdays of November and screened across different cultural venues in Mumbai, the event opens up multiple commentaries with curators, artists, students and other curious minds. VAICA opens at Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in December.

While films – short or long – may follow a linear narrative logic or yield messaging, video art often departs into formal and imaginative abstractions. In redefining the reception of the image, music and text, video art nuances and broadens the interpretative dimension of the medium as well as the message, beyond the realm of entertainment. While independent tools for video recording became available across the world only by late 1960s, in India, they were available outside the state-owned broadcasting only from the 1990s. This was the time when portable video recording equipment could be privately imported into the country, which explains the growth of video art in India primarily after the phase of liberalization. In tracing the history of video art in India in the VAICA festival catalogue, Mukherjee explains that “[t]he first significant video art that one can remember was done in 1993 by Vivan Sundaram as part of the Memorial Show, after the Bombay riots of 1992-93 that followed the demolition of Babri Masjid. Soon after that, Navjot Altaf, responding to the same events, showed Links Destroyed and Rediscovered (1994). Then came Nalini Malani’s Remembering Toba Tek Singh (1998) taking off from Saadat Hasan Manto’s story set against the backdrop of Partition.”

In their videos, artists push the imaginative aspects of the medium and ways of seeing on the one hand, and raise questions about numerous social issues around gender, colour, environment, displacement, consumerism on the other. In doing so, many artists enhance their respective visual languages. For example, Archana Hande finds a mid-way between painting and video, achieving an animation-like quality to speak about the politics of colour and the transformation of the city in the two videos shown at VAICA. Her works All is Fair in Magic White and Of Panorama present a cross-section of several histories at once – from Mumbai’s urban past to world art. Sumakshi Singh brings us to wonder about drawing could draw itself in video. In Halfway here! she collapses the represented space and the space of representation, taking the viewer inside the drawing, disorienting our perception. The labour involved in putting the work together is revealed in the purposefully induced glitches where the disconnected lines drawn over three-dimensional surfaces, perceived coherently in the strategic videographic framing, become apparent to the viewer.

A large number of videos in the curation call for a reflection on the social issues within our country. In the restless breath-space of sound in LOC, Surekha stages the movement of a tiny ant restrained in the outline casually drawn on paper using a ballpoint pen. Over an approximately four-minute video-clip, viewers begin to understand boundaries and their metaphorical meanings. Shakuntala Kulkarni’s works principally address issues of patriarchy. In Through the Door, Kulkarni employs her experience from theatre into creating a dreamlike entrapment – a nightmarish void through which women repeatedly struggle to pass through. The troubled female body manifests the tension felt in breaking away from social impositions in this disturbingly silent video. Role I would like to play and Is this Just a Game Part I-IV theatrically enact the inner experiences of women by invoking the metaphoric capacities of popular games. Similarly, Vidya Kamat’s Wish I had stayed at Home tries to weigh the outward veneration and worship of women against their everyday objectification, assault and molestation in the public sphere. 

The politics around urban architecture is closely read in the videos of Meera Devidayal. Through spectacular shots, Devidayal takes us into the otherwise restricted, ruined landscape of shut-down Mumbai mills in A levelled Playing Field that is provisionally used by locals as a cricket ground. Soon however, as the artist juxtaposes / screens capitalist aspirations of the state onto the mill’s large open window-frames, one gets a glimpse into the kitschy Disneyland of dreams that the space may eventually become. However, in her Water has Memory, such a contested consumerist urban transformation is offset by the soft, yet ironical existence of the sea. Buildings allude to paintings as Devidayal captures the reflections of seawater sharply onto their glass facades, contrapuncted with the sounds of each other. Such a sonic editing invites us to contemplate upon the experiential relationship city dwellers of Mumbai share with the edge of the sea. Viewers are misled into thinking of rhythmic bat strokes as repeated hammering in Paribartana Mohanty’s Trees are stranger than Aliens in the Movies that unpacks moral and existential questions while being revealed into the hollow shell of Pragati Maidan Expo building in Delhi. While the building has been demolished despite fierce protests and appeals, Mohanty poses questions about architectural heritage and collective memory in the face of development.

Mithu Sen’s Unpoetry and Bharati Kapadia’s L for… work through motion typography and make letters dance as well as evoke plethora of inner emotions through the written word. Unpoetry is the artist’s diary that brings us into the space of constantly flickering, unstable nature of human thought. The screen of social media becomes the platform through which Sen voyeuristically stages to the viewers her poetic and literary world of thoughts. Dynamic appearances of letters in typing, cutting, pasting, undoing, striking off on the screen that quietly define our everyday micro-visual cultures in Sen’s imaginative rendering and recreation of the screen. In her L for…, Kapadia brings viewers to swim in a range of emotions through which she charts a topography for the landscape of LOVE. Dismantling it as an acronym, Kapadia creates a glossary of words indexed in the four letters L, O, V, E, that realize their emotions visually through gesticulating typography. A quick counterpart of the same script in sign language enacted by dance practitioner Avantika Bahl, directed by Kapadia offers an expanded reading to the definition of love.

Video remains a crucial medium through which several art / forms are able to survive as documentation. Performance works of artists like Muskaan Singh, Manmeet Devgun or Jeetin Rangher essentially mount the body or (its) installation as the material for visual consumption, risking the ambient evocation of the act that centrally impacts the reception of such work. It is here that the question of what constitutes ‘video art’ surfaces, for in these, the medium is then harnessed merely in its functional radius rather than teasing its audio-visual potentials. A new visual culture emerges as mobile phones today have lent almost everyone the capacity to be a producer of video, furthering the question of when, after all, does video become art? In the concluding panel discussion, art historian V Divakar alarms us of his concern over the canonization of the medium, successfully challenged in the proliferating democratization of the means of production of video. What do we then anticipate as the opportunities and / or pitfalls of the emerging video culture that is produced and disseminated independently? We hope that the festival will grow in the future to shape critical discourse around video art, and involve audiences in thinking about the ways in which they craft and consume an environment increasingly encompassed in moving images.