A Photogenetic Line: CAMP’s Archival Photo Installation
CAMP (Critical Art and Media Practices) is a collaborative studio co-founded by Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran, together with a dedicated group of practitioners. Recently awarded the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize, the studio is concerned with research, documentation and infrastructural interventions in the various technologies of film, video, electronic media and public art forms.
In 2019, CAMP produced A Photogenetic Line for the Chennai Photo Biennale, which was exhibited at Experimenter later that year. This is a series of carefully cropped and laser-cut photographs drawn from the archives of the Hindu. The hundred-foot long archaeological sequence reincarnates archival documents and reorganises them to construct a horizontal and disjointed historical narrative, highlighting coincidences and contradictions through its non-linear retelling, questioning the very notions of shared intelligence and empowerment.
View of the exhibition from the entrance. (CAMP, A Photogenetic Line. Kolkata, 2019, Archival Photo Cut-outs. Chennai Photo Biennale/ Experimenter Gallery. Image courtesy of the artists.)
The 100-foot-long installation is built from the archives of the Hindu. (CAMP. Kolkata, 2019. A Photogenetic Line. Archival Photo Cut-outs. Chennai Photo Biennale/ Experimenter Gallery. Image courtesy of the artists.)
This montage of shifting timelines is set against the background of India’s liberalisation and Nehruvian modernism. The artists play with this terrain as the protagonists grow older or younger, backgrounds come into the foreground or vice versa, and captions refer to each other. The cut-outs are also used as a tool to create new boundaries.
The movement of the images gains momentum as the narrative intensifies: Beginning at the Lahore Station, we witness the spread of Gandhi’s nonviolence movement. As we move forward, post-colonial India’s political trajectory starts to unfold. The installation bears evidence to the rise and fall of Rajiv Gandhi, the Kashmir conflict, modernisation, language politics, protests against fascism, the demolition of Babri Masjid and its effects in the subcontinent. The series ends with two photographs of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay set forty years apart, followed by a photograph of Mr. Duke of Kashmir playing snooker blindfolded, sending us back down the timeline.
The images reinscribed meaning and a new historical significance when viewed in the discursive and creative contexts of media ontology and cross-chronologies. A fragment of this narrative shows Mehbooba Mufti seated on a chair covered in plastic, inaugurating a computer laboratory in Southern Kashmir in 2015. This is followed by an image of a weaver in Chennai repairing a chair with plastic wires in 1976, adjoining this is a photograph from 2014 showing Kashmiri protestors throwing plastic chairs at policemen in Srinagar.
Through this topographical installation, CAMP manages to strike up some mysterious conversations, revealing the rhizomatic manner in which history is recalled and remembered through subject-driven orientations. In a time where histories are being rewritten, retold or completely erased, CAMP’s A Photogenetic Line is a vital and reflective installation that lends the viewer creative and critical glimpses of an alternative nationalist past and local media history.
It is 1937: a tall man, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, an Independence activist also known as Frontier Gandhi, is photographed standing outside the Lahore Station accompanied by a Lahore-based Gandhian Choithram Gidwani. Adjacent to this is a photograph of Khan inside a train surrounded by people (left). Subsequently, Khan is seen standing at an unknown location, at an unknown time, surrounded by members of Khudai Khidmatgar, the non-violent army he built during the 1920s (right). (CAMP. Kolkata, 2019. A Photogenetic Line. Archival Photo Cut-outs. Chennai Photo Biennale / Experimenter Gallery. Image courtesy of the artists.)
A photograph from 1969 shows Khan breaking a fast, next to him is J P Narayan, an anti-Congress figure of the Emergency. Sixteen years later, Khan is seen sitting outside the Congress office in Delhi for their centenary celebrations. A day before this, the photograph records a Congress delegation headed by Rajiv Gandhi at the Parliament airport greeting Khan. (CAMP. Kolkata, 2019. A Photogenetic Line. Archival Photo Cut-outs. Chennai Photo Biennale / Experimenter Gallery. Image courtesy of the artists.)
In October 1992, a man was seriously injured after a cut-out of Rajiv Gandhi fell on him in Bengaluru. Following images reveal that this happened after Rajiv’s assassination in May 1991. The forensic scientist Pakkiriswamy Chandra Sekharan is found demonstrating Rajiv Gandhi’s fall after the explosion of the bomb that killed him. (CAMP. Kolkata, 2019. A Photogenetic Line. Archival Photo Cut-outs. Chennai Photo Biennale / Experimenter Gallery. Image courtesy of the artists.)
Watch the walk-through of the exhibition here.
