VAICA 2 - Video Art by Indian Contemporary Artists

VAICA is a public platform that looks closely at artful and critical engagements in video and moving images by Indian contemporary artists. It brings video practitioners of Indian origin from various backgrounds who have found themselves experimenting with the medium. This edition of the VAICA festival, FIELDS OF VISION, brings together 79 artists with 121 video works.

Fields of Vision

Screen spaces define and describe new geographies of inhabitation in contemporary times. ‘Fields of Vision’ presents an array of visual experiments by contemporary video practitioners of Indian origin that expand our imaginative geography through four interpolated fields: art-science, body-desire, real-imagined and hetero-urban. The pluralising of the singular ‘field’ into the multiple ‘fields’ proposes widening of perspectives, multiplying vectors of viewing, and discovering new directions for inhabitation and wandering. 121 videos by 78 artists, distributed into four chapters over four weeks of the VAICA festival will delve closely into charting new coordinates through which videographies rephrase, re-engineer and perhaps puncture our normalised field of vision.


Week 1
Cartographies of Sensation

The first set of videos under ‘Fields of Vision’ attempt to locate the cartographies of sensation – those that attempt to map the coordinates of experience, observation, perception and artistic production. In these mappings, moving images play closely between the dialectics of science and fiction. They become poetries of thought and speculation. Much like the make-up of the cartesian cross-grid, they interweave worlds of science and art – both that relocate the boundaries of awareness of the self and the surroundings. The moving images slow down time, make us pause, repeat and reconsider, or suspend us in limbo towards opening new ways to sense the world. Through such awareness, one may begin to demarcate a space of expanded consciousness.


Week 2
Orbits of Desire

‘Orbits of Desire’ brings together video works that explore subjects of gender, sexuality, relationships and performance that are circumscribed by bodily acts. Body is the medium through which we make memories or perform inner desire. What fragments of time become worthy of preserving, to what extent does one stretch limits of performativity, how do we inhabit memory and what are our limits of retention? These are questions that the videos in this section address. Videos become sites of retention and release and effectively preserve temporal bodies as archives. They allow us to rediscover our desires in orchestrating strategic encounters with time, accumulated into their visual orbits.


Week 3
Peripheries of the Real

This segment puts together video experiments that explore environmental aspects that remain unattended or obviated due to excessive immersion or inadvertent neglect. Such conditions highlight instances of not only parallel reals but also the surreal, hyperreal, para-real or unreal. The digital space today extends our present lives into the netherworld of the virtual. The pandemic inverted humanity’s sense of reality by locking us within our homes or producing the fear of the outside. Absences and presences interchange their roles in our everyday keeping us within the peripheries of the real. The videos here attempt to come to terms with, or even expose us to a sense that field of reality that we encounter seems to be bounded merely by a mythical horizon.


Week 4
Urban Heterotopias

Urban heterotopias make themselves apparent most vividly through videoscapes. These other spaces create their own psycho-geographies within the shared space of the city. The city inevitably is the most charged site for the performance of politics. It is the ground where multiple ideologies dance with each other. What forms of co-habitations and contestations take place within the city? What rhythms do conflicting ideologies produce and how do they negotiate power? The videos in the concluding session closely contemplate upon the urban condition as well as political actions that consistently rework our landscapes of everyday encounters. Can these revelations readdress our equation with the urban space thereby altering our fields of vision?

Book Worm, CSMVS

An open library in the campus of the Chattrapati Shivaji Maharaj Sangrahalaya designed by Nuru Karim.

 

Architectural Diagrams - 4

 

Mumbai Metro

Clinics

 

A Doctor's clinic in the Goregaon, northern suburb of Mumbai. 

Contrary to one's architectural imagination, this space is perhaps one of the simplest manifestation of the doctor's clinic. A rectangular gala approximately 12 feet x 12 feet, the clinic is divided into two halves - a private and a public. The private part screened behind a wooden partition contains an examination bed, doctors table and a tiny washroom. The remaining part, essentially the waiting area, spills over the pavement. Plastic stools kept stacked inside are released and arranged abutting the closed shop to extend hospitality! literally. In this instance, the medical shop adjoining the clinic partakes the responsibility of handing tokens to the patients. 

This time I wondered what do we do while we are still waiting in clinics for our turns to visit the doctor. And that's when my attention turned to the numerous bills stuck on all the surfaces of the waiting area. Charts and diagrams explaining the anatomy of the body, dos and donts regarding different habits and diseases, rights and duties of the ailing body, calendars and schedules with photographs of deities, sometimes random artworks, certificates and degrees legitimizing the medical practice... All such bills take you into different spaces, different times. 

In the soupy space of the clinic, these bills become a potent distraction for the grieving patients. Several ifs and buts arise as our turns arrive. Others engulfed with pain sit with their eyes closed, leaning onto their guardians or partners. Those visiting for regular checkups also pass time on their phone, and catch up on usual business transactions. In the background of such soundscape, one tries to stay afloat of personal medical anxieties. 

RMA Exhibition at Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai

'The Architecture of Practice'

a retrospective exhibition on the practice of Rahul Mehrotra 

curated by Kaiwan Mehta

Bombay Zine Fest 2021

on Political Economy

On Writing

It's ironic that a forum on writing is one in which we all are compelled to talk, for as a writer, one's recluse has primarily been the space of the text where you don't have to face an audience. The difference between speaking and writing, if one may draw attention to, is precisely that (or analogical to) between theatre and cinema or live singing and playback. The writing desk essentially allows you to take retakes, it allows you multiple rehearsals. This stage is for speaking - and speaking the right things at once - and it thus puts you in a pressure to be alert at every moment. The piece of writing has the luxury of being on the wrong side, circulating within in circles, accumulating soft criticisms (or criticisms softly), contemplate, meditate on them and keep building up ideas. To speak is not the same.


Writing is also a work, an exercise in organising thoughts, particularly of a scattered of a mind that is distracting itself in multiple directions due to the open field of referents it is invariably suspended in. Writing is a task in putting order to seemingly stray array of thoughts that are produced as well as consumed, and weaving these into some kind of story to bring a coherence for the sake of meaning, or to create a meaningful world that could be inhabited or make one's place in an open undisposed field.

More discussion here with Nisha Nair Gupta 

on 5th September 2021, which was also Teachers' Day in India.

Drawings