URBAN HETEROTOPIAS
The festival presents films that looks closely at artful and critical engagements in video and moving images by Indian contemporary artists. Organised in collaboration with Video Art by Indian Contemporary Artists (VAICA), the festival is curated by Bharati Kapadia, Chandita Mukherjee and Anuj Daga, the festival is focuses on three themes – The Cartographies of Sensation; Peripheries of the Real; and Urban Heterotopias
Gigi Scaria Amusement Park 05.24
Notions of identity, industrialisation, lifestyle, crime, spirituality and almost anything that society has asserted, are constantly produced and consumed by the city, since the earliest urban formations.
Abeer Khan Makaan 04.24
In this work by Abeer Khan we are shown Mumbai's government housing for the evicted residents of slums. Filming entirely from the exterior, Abeer communicates the despondency of the residents during the lockdown.
Amol Patil Rest 02.31
Amol Patil misses the lively streets of Mumbai in his childhood, where activists staged plays and students studied under street lamps.
Babu Eashwar Prasad On the Road 05.12
Babu Eshwar Prasad revisits footage recorded from moving vehicles, to give us a meditation on roadways.
Amshu Chukki Dinner Party 07.38
The scene of an abandoned dinner party, overlaid with mud, overgrown with weeds, a comfortable domestic set-up reclaimed by nature. Amshu Chukki moves his camera in a long fluid take with the gaze of a detective or archaeologist, looking closely at every surface, going into the nooks and corners.
Katyayini Gargi The Centre does not Hold (Patterns emerge) 04.10
“Why does one chase after a sense of stability?” asks Katyayani Gargi. The title is an allusion to a poem by WB Yeats: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world ...”
Sukanya Ghosh A Chair walks into a Landscape 05.34
Sukanya Ghosh continues her ongoing engagement with photographs from her family archive in this video. She looks at the nature of leisure and holiday photographs, saying “I construct lines of sight in fictive landscapes which are inhabited by ghostly apparitions of people long gone.”
Moonis Ahmad Accidentally Miraculous Lives 07.12
Moonis Ahmad stitches together images with the technique of photogrammetry. The stitching is possible at some points and fractured at others, acting as an allegory of the impossible stitch, behind which the stories, histories and regional figures become inaccessible.
Sabyasachi Bhattacharjee Far from Home 02.03
Sabyasachi Bhattacharjee builds vivid imaginary worlds. Far from Home takes us to an observation deck, looking out on what looks like an amusement park at night. Later, by daylight, this seems to be a system of production, not entertainment.
Sabyasachi Bhattacharjee Homecoming 02.03
Homecoming takes us to a dystopic future. The setting is a corner of an urban settlement. The action is played out on several visual planes.
Sabyasachi Bhattacharjee Survival Engine 01.30
Sabyasachi Bhattacharjee takes us to a relatively close view of the dystopian world seen in Far from Home. This gives us an insight into a system that treats citizens as fodder for its greed. Sabyasachi’s process involves manipulating original and sourced images, to form new wholes from different parts, which then turn up in entirely new contexts.
Sheba Chhachhi Moving the City 05.58
Sheba Chhachhi is interested in the increased fluidity between private and public space in contemporary cityscapes that allows for new explorations and possible subjectivities. Here she stages a performance by a young woman, a series of movements, drawing on dance and yoga, on the Delhi streets.
Karthik K G Seismic Vibrato 04.54
Karthik KG contemplates the aesthetics of digital modulations. He makes enquiries through the use of algorithmic culture, new modes of knowledge production and the shaping of digital subjectivities in contemporary society.
Suresh B V Canes of Wrath 03.17
Suresh B V says that canes are everywhere. Always in the front-lines when cities turn into battlegrounds, canes instill fear, to ensure silence.
Swagata Bhattacharyya Road Scene 03.19
Swagata Bhattacharyya represents the road as a site of performance in this video. He navigates the viewer through a road that is transformed into a fortified site of conflict.
Tushar Waghela The Ghost Taxonomy 04.57
In The Ghost Taxonomy, Tushar Waghela alludes to the complex matrix of inequity in Indian society and how we have accepted it as a natural consequence of growth. This is woven into our social fabric and income disparity is institutionalised.
Ushnish Mukhopadhyay Where was I Last Night? 04.03
Ushnish Mukhopadhyay engages with particular spaces and events. Here the protagonist comes to consciousness in an unfamiliar room and tries to take stock of his situation. The alarming feeling caused by a temporary loss of awareness, of no memory of events that may have led to the present situation, of being overwhelmed by the fear that some irretrievable damage may have been done, are explored here.
For more details of the screenings, kindly please visit www.vaica.org/catalogue
