Re-Mapping the Familiar: In Conversation with Bharati Kapadia, Anuj Daga and Chandita Mukherjee
Recorded on 22 December 2021.
A public platform that brings together video practitioners of Indian origin, the Video Art by Indian Contemporary Artists (VAICA) Festival’s second cycle ran online from 20 November to 18 December 2021, on the principle of free access. Titled Fields of Vision, the festival brought together 79 artists and a total of 121 video works that were presented over the four weeks, with each week’s set being replaced by the next in a rolling format. Encouraging multiple vectors of viewing, the videos were categorised in accordance with their dominant thematic thrusts, namely “Cartographies of Sensation,” “Orbits of Desire,” “Peripheries of the Real,” and “Urban Heterotopias.” Spanning a range of concerns around the body, gender, the city and the environment, the videos cumulatively sought to shift the familiar coordinates of perception, as affirmed through visual abundance and repetition in the contemporary infosphere. Screened in the condition of the global pandemic, the works spoke intimately to the insecurities generated by collisions between absence and presence, real and unreal, and an altered sense of the horizon.
As a contemporary practice, video art is placed in the lineage of moving image economies. Situated between the black box and the white cube (and now, increasingly, in the prosthetic extension of mobile devices), video art intends to chart cartographies of expanded consciousness by positing an alternative to mimetic representations in image. In this episode of ASAP Cast, Najrin Islam is in conversation with the curators of the VAICA Festival: artist, graphic designer, art consultant and performer Bharati Kapadia; architect and writer Anuj Daga; and documentary filmmaker Chandita Mukherjee. This edition of the festival (unlike its physical precedent) was curated with the awareness that the videos would be watched on mobile phones and other devices that offered a compressed scale compared to the traditional screen―thus, admitting into its purview the possibilities of rewinding, repeating, freezing frames, and attendant degrees of immersion. Through these user-interventions, the moving image is lent a formal malleability and temporal flexibility. The ontology of the image is thus foregrounded through these discussions, in how they are produced, received, and the role they play in inducing reflective or critical states in the viewer. We conclude with a discussion around the perimeters of the screen, and how the apparatus engineers new modes of production and seeing, while the festival intends to actively re-map subjectivities and enable a circulation of plural visibilities.
(Featured Image: Still from Isosceles Forest. Sukanya Ghosh. 2018. Image courtesy of the artist and VAICA.)
To read more about the works featured as part of VAICA’s Fields of Vision, please click here, here, here, here and here.
