Artists' Cinema : Curated by C S Venkiteswaran

6th Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival 2018

Jointly organised by MARUPAKKAM and Goethe-Institut Chennai 

Artists' Cinema : Curated by C S Venkiteswaran, curator / critic

Films :

Sahej Rahal

Forerunner / 2013 /12.13’

The Antebellum Ritual / 6.00’

Katabasis / 6.10

Saras / 1.45

Nina Paley

Copying is not Theft / 1.00’

This Land is Mine / 3.30’

God is Male /1.17’

Gotta Believe in Me /2.52

Pandorama /2.43

All Creative Work is Derivative /2.20’

Ashish Avikuntak

Antaral (End Note) /17.50’

Riyas Komu

Last Wall / 2014 /12.48’

My Grave / 2010 /12.28

Sumedh Rajendran

Half Return /2016 /15.46

Gigi Scaria

Poetic Realism /2.59

Panic City /2.52

Amusement Park /0.15

Let it be /4.35

No Parallel / 2010 /6.00’

Sudarshan Shetty

Waiting for Others to Arrive /10.00’

Mithu Sen

I’ve only one Language and that’s not Mine / 2014 / 42.00’

Murali Cherooth

Old Story /2009/2.39'

Curator's Note

C S Venkiteswaran 

With the erasure of boundaries between traditional mediums, we find artists all over the world exploring fresh convergence and synergies between media, creating exciting spaces of art-imagination, art-making and art-experience. Graphics enter text, live performance perforate projections, music melds with images, sculptures begin to melt and dance, imagination becomes viral and virtual.. In the process, the ideas about fiction and documentary too are changing, bringing forth a new body of work that is aesthetically daring, formally exciting and politically engaging.   

Artists Cinema brings together a clutch of moving image works by some of the most eminent artists that explore the boundaries of art and experiment with various forms, genres, storytelling traditions, narrative modes, graphic strategies and animation techniques. These works narrate the world and our lives in all its fluid complexity and political turmoil. They grapple with identity and belonging, tradition and modernity, nativity and exile, voice and silence, noise and language, survival and celebration, protest and anger – to mediate and reflect, image and imagine, interrogate and narrate, the world we live in. Most films play with time in its various manifestations and experiences: as memory, nostalgia, history etc..  and explore space and place in evocative ways, as belonging and exile, journeys - real and virtual, as endless vistas that extend endlessly and claustrophobic places that enclose and entrap.

Apart from such spatio-temporal explorations, in terms of forms and formats, these films  employ complex yet very evocative layering of various audiovisual elements - sound, music, dialogue, voice over and texts with real, archival, graphic and animated images. From the viewers, these works provoke a certain kind of sraddha (both care and attention) and demand asraddha, a disavowal or resistance to the flow of images, narratives and information through various political, personal and social media that inundate us incessantly..

CS Venkiteswaran is a critic, curator and documentary filmmaker based in Thiruvananthapuram

About the Artists

SAHEJ RAHAL

Sahej Rahal’s installations, films and performances are part of a constructed mythology that he creates drawing upon sources ranging from local legends to science fiction. By bringing these into dialogue with each other, Rahal creates scenarios where indeterminate beings emerge into the everyday as if from the cracks in our civilization. Rahal’s participation in institutional and major solo & group exhibitions internationally have included Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham UK, 2o18; Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, 2017; PRIMARY Nottingham, UK 2017; the Liverpool Biennial, 2016; Setouchi Triennial, 2016; Jewish Museum, New York, 2015; Kochi Muziris Biennale, 2014; Vancouver Biennale, 2014; MACRO Museum, Rome, 2014.

Sahej Rahel’s artworks revel in masculine fantasy, while also mocking its affectations. The solitary characters he essays seem to have emerged from Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces refracted through

GIGI SCARIA

Born 1973, Kothanalloor, Kerala, India;

M.F.A. (painting), Jamia Millia University, New Delhi 1998;

B.F.A. (painting), College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram1995

Lives and works in Delhi

“In Panic city I made a shift from what I have done earlier. I used digital images of the old city’s bird’s eye view and Flash animation in it. For me Panic city deals with fast erosion of the old/modern city scapes by the new world of corporates.

For me social engagement is a constant dialogue; a dialogue in which you include voices of the “Other” constantly. The voice of the “Other “is not only the voice of the marginalized but also of our own critical Self. That is how you encountered me.

Definition of a video has been widely debated now. It came to exist as an art form in the mid sixties or early seventies. Video had distinguished features when it was initially established as an art form. It fundamentally differed from the film because of the technological advantages, (suppose what you have recorded can be seen at the same time unlike the film) fluid structure (layers of images can be made easily) and could capture day today events as a spectator. And it also allowed opening up a range of innovative and radical ways of expanding personal view points. Which means video makes the film more personal.”

SUDARSHAN SHETTY

Sudarshan Shetty (born 1961) is a contemporary Indian artist who has worked in painting, sculpture, installation, video, sound and performance. He has exhibited widely in India and more recently he has become increasingly visible on the international stage as an important voice in contemporary art. His work has been exhibited at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan, and the Tate Modern, London, England. The artist has been a resident at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, United States, and was aFord Foundation Fellow at the New School for General Studies, New York

Sudarshan Shetty's oeuvre has been defined mostly by large sculptural installations and multi-media works.

Experimenting with innumerable materials and medium his installations or assemblages use quotidian objects juxtaposed in an attempt to open up new possibilities of meaning. Eschewing straightforward devices of narrative and explicit symbolism. and displaying a fascination for the mechanics of toys and mechanised objects, Shetty infuses domestic, essentially inert objects with new life. The world of everyday contraptions, objects (especially those from middle class showcases, or shop-front show windows), continues to be reconfigured from moment to moment in his work)

He often uses simple, repetitive, mechanical movements and sound in kinetic works that explore aspects of temporality. Shetty says, “The ploy is to attract the viewer and then to disenchant them with the mechanical movement.” These mechanical pieces together with scenes of domestic interiority are conceived to create places of amusement or what Shetty refers to as a ‘fairground spectacle’. Things form a gaggle of actors, their movements become acts in a play. “The idea is definitely to bring in the activity of a market place to the fore. This is also a ploy to bring in a passerby into this arena – to seduce with the familiar.”

NINA PALEY

Nina Paley (born May 3, 1968) is an American cartoonist, animator and free culture activist She directed the animated feature film Sita Sings the Blues. She was the artist and often the writer of comic strips Nina's Adventures and Fluff, but most of her recent work has been in animation

In 1999, she made the world's first cameraless IMAX film, Pandorama,, a short Modernist film which was shown widely at major film festivals .In 2001, she produced Fetch!, a humorous short cartoon feature based on a variety of optical illusions, which has enjoyed popularity ever since.

Beginning in 2002, Paley embarked focused her work on the controversial subject of population growth. The most notable entry she produced on this subject was The Stork, in which the natural environment is bombed to destruction by storks dropping bundled babies. The film is a compact expression of the conflict between increasing human population and the ecosystem in which it must live. Early in 2010 Paley started drawing a new three-panel comic strip called Mimi & Eunice. She is distributing it on the web using a copyleft license. In 2013, Paley created an animation on Vimeo depicting the Middle East conflicts over history; it was named a Staff Pick.

ASHISH AVIKUNTHAK

Ashish Avikunthak has been making films for the past 22 years. In 2014, He was named Future Greats 2014 by Art Review. Its citation succinctly describes his films:

“In an artworld where an increasing number of critics are arguing that much globalised art takes the form of hollowed-out visual Esperanto, Avikunthak’s works insist on an Indian epistemology while utilising a rigorously formal visual language that is clearly aware of Western avant-garde practices such as those of Andrei Tarkovsky and Samuel Beckett. These are self-consciously difficult works that are filmed in a self-consciously beautiful way”.

His films have been shown worldwide in film festivals, galleries and museums. Notable screenings were at the Tate Modern, London, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, Taipei Biennial 2012, Shanghai Biennial 2014, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, along with London, Locarno, Rotterdam, and Berlin film festivals among other locations.

He has had retrospective of his works at Centre for Moving Image Arts, Bard College (2015), Apeejay Arts Gallery, New Delhi (2015), Rice University (2014), Signs Festival, Trivandrum (2013), Festival International Signes de Nuit, Paris (2012), Yale University (2008), and National Centre for Performing Arts, Mumbai (2008) and Les Inattendus, Lyon (2006). In 2011 he was short listed for the Skoda Prize for Indian Contemporary Art.

He has a PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology from Stanford University and has earlier taught at Yale University. He is now an Associate Professor in Film/Media at Harrington School of Communication, University of Rhode Island.

SUMEDH RAJENDRAN

Born in 1972 Sumedh graduated from the College of Fine Arts, Trivandrum, and the Delhi College of Art. He lives and works in New Delhi.

“Rajendran has piloted a fresh approach to sculpture in India. He develops his sculptures which I have described elsewhere as sculptural composites through various permutations of stainless steel, perforated iron sheets, leather, tiles and concrete. When I say that these works leap out of themselves, I refer both to the lively tropism that they demonstrate towards the larger world of experience, and to the specific challenge which they pose to the practice of sculpture in India.

Rajendran’s composites address the question of whether it is possible to make sculpture in India today. Not sculpture-installation, which opens up many fronts of entry and trails a ragged and overtly provocative edge through social space, but sculpture that is relatively self-contained and insists on its kinship with the classical topoi of the frieze, the niche and the equestrian figure: sculpture that is midway between the focality of the singular image and the distributed quality of the assemblage, but close to the former in affinity and intent.

The haunting melancholia of Rajendran’s art is informed by this realisation; by his engagements with the breakdown of civility, communication, mutuality and the recognition of a shared condition. The situation on which he dwells are concerned with revenge paid in blood, loyalty demanded under pressure, false subsidies, sins donated while rewards are withheld, promises that are broken, vision that have been betrayed. We have the distinct impression of an artist who has elected to take up the long and thankless task of maintaining vigil: he waits for the apocalypse, though not as a fatalist but as a cautioner. These sculptural composites are the cautioner ’stales, which Sumedh Rajendran tells us on the way, not to Canterbury, but to Armageddon. “ (Ranjit Hoskote)

RIYAS KOMU

Riyas Komu was born in 1971 in Kerala, and moved to Mumbai in 1992 to study literature. Dropping out during his final year, Komu eventually obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Fine Art from the Sir J. J. School of Art in 1997 and 1999 respectively. Since his graduation, Komu has been constantly asserting and pushing himself with a strong body of work. He is the founder member of Kochi Muziris Biennale.

The artist’s oeuvre, spanning several different media and genres, is particularly noticed for its strong political overtones. His paintings, to put it in his own words, carry a protest symbol one way or the other. He has remarked, “I strongly feel it is my duty to be political. I believe that my paintings should look back at the viewer rather than just tell a story or hang on the wall.” Influenced by his father’s political leanings and his own brief associations with political student groups, Komu is keen on using his work to “ring alarm bells” about the explosive urban situation he encountered in Mumbai. His body of work references the paradoxes of the urban situation, where on one hand, there is glamour, and on the other, abject poverty. Creating his pieces with equal doses of compassion and cynicism, Komu’s work reflects both hope and dejection – a tribute to the spirit of all those who continue to survive the city and its paradoxes.

Some of Komu’s recent solo shows include ones of his photographic works at the Guild Gallery, Mumbai, in 2008 and 2005, and two exhibitions held at Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, in 2005 and 2002. His works have also been featured in group exhibitions held at Saffronart and the Guild Gallery, Mumbai, in 2004; the Harmony Show, Mumbai, in 2003, where he won the ‘Excellence Award for Emerging Artist of the Year’; the Fine Art Company, Mumbai, in 2002; the Guild Gallery, Mumbai, in 2001 and 2002; Lakeeren and Tao Art Gallery, Mumbai, in 2000; and the National Gallery of Modern Art annual shows in 1999 and 2000. In 1997, Komu received the two year long K. K. Hebbar Foundation Society Scholarship, and has also been honoured with the Bombay Art Society Award in 1996 and the Maharashtra State Art Prize in 1995. The artist lives and works in Mumbai.

MITHU SEN

Mithu Sen is a an earth based (New Delhi, India) artist/poet who studied painting at Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, India and Glasgow School of Art, UK.

Mithu Sen plays. She messes. She creates..

Her practice revolves around creating situations of impossible possibility.

She lets strangeness and strangers in, radically, hospitably.

In doing this she questions the boundaries of hospitality; identifies them, embodies them, inhabits them- and then refutes and ignores them. Breaking them apart from within.

Mithu Sen dislikes the word “medium.” She 'life's .

Sen’s practice centres her constant need to be expressive in limitless ways; in ways that are counter to limits; that deny them. Her work involves the use of blank space-- her detailed drawings highlight the otherwise unseen, and parody or dismiss what our eyes are used to catching.

Sen has accessories/tools that extend and include her bodymind. She draws, creates videos, and sculptures.

Her practice converses and responds; and is therefore constantly adapting itself; it shapeshifts from one medium to another. People are sparked to reflect on several realms and layers of thinking and questioning in her work, including: (Untaboo) sexuality,

(unmonolith) identity, Radical hospitality (guest-host-hospitality-tolerance), Counter capitalism, and lingual anarchy

Her journey critiques subtle hierarchical codes and hegemony; Mithu’s work lives in the spaces between when Humanity becomes minority (sexual, political, regional, emotional, lingual...).

The usage of (uncodified) subconscious language as a form of resistance against the dominating languages, has led Sen to create an abstract body of gibberish text that claims repressed emotional voices and a potential moment of lingual anarchy. Her work also engages with the idea of radical hospitality with an aim to generate a concurrent dialogue between the guest and the host. It approaches to deconstruct the institutional space and question/redefine the imposed etiquettes on hospitality.

She has held solo exhibitions at Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, Austria; Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan USA; Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Brussels, Belgium; Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris; Gallery Steph, Singapore; Louis Vuitton Espace, Taipei; Albion Gallery, London; Suzie Q project, Zurich; Krinzinger Project, Vienna; Nature Morte, New Delhi and Berlin; Bose Pacia Gallery, New York; Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai; Lakeeren Gallery, Mumbai; Machintosh Gallery, Glasgow and the British Council, New Delhi.

MURALI CHEEROTH

Murali Cheeroth received BFA and MFA in painting from Shanthi Niketan. He has exhibited in various significant shows across the globe in the last 2 decades of his art practice. His visual language refers deeply to a variety of sources in the cultural sphere and contains within it a conversation of history of representation in visual media – including literature, fine art, cinema and architecture. His current practice envelopes painting, performance and video art, exploring themes of urbanism and intersections of the global and the local. He lives and works in Bangalore, India.

 Murali Cheeroth has exhibited in over 100 significant shows across the globe in the last two decades. Among his collectors are corporate institutions, museums and private art collectors. In the past he worked extensively with printmaking and theater, now he primarily works on painting, video and performance. His visual works refer to a wide variety of sources in the cultural sphere and contain within them a deep conversation with the history of representation in visual media, fine art, cinema, music and architecture. Within the context of the history of visual representation, his current explorations include the architecture of the city, urbanization and urban cultures. He looks closely at the ideas of speed and change, intersections of local and the global, multiple layers of urban identities and so on. Murali situates each work within larger thematic explorations in humanities, social sciences and in visual art media.

He has also taught in CEPT, Ahmedabad, Kanoria Centre for Art, Ahmedabad, National Institute of Fashion Technology, Bangalore and Chennai. His engagement with this broad range of institutions is readable from his conceptual and figurative concerns. Some of his major exhibitions include ‘passage to India’ – the New Indian Art from the Frank Cohen collection in UK (2009); Indian Art summit in New Delhi, SH contemporary Art Fair, Shanghai, Chicago Art Fair and London Art Fair in 2010, Colombo Beinnale , 2012,  Chalo India – A group show of Contemporary Indian Artists at Basel Art Centre, Basel, Switzerland, Feb 2014.

His art education includes a BFA and MFA from Shantinikethan, West Bengal and advanced computer diploma in digital media.

Old Story

In this work I make an attempt to look back at my past political life, which can be termed as the historic self search of an activist who is somewhat giving in to the stillness, stagnancy and inaction of the present urban life in which he finds himself. What I want to search in the poetry of Martin Niemöller is the question that I have to ask to myself, because we are passing through an era that is more or less similar to the Nazi period, and I feel that the importance of this poetry still exists in our society. Or in other words, somewhere we keep an affinity towards the Nazi bend of mind. In this poem, a person addresses himself and reveals the nefarious attitude that he has been inculcating while living in a cruel and ideological society. He denounced everyone, the communists, the Christians, the Jews and everyone. But finally the Nazis came in search of him and at that time there was nobody left to be denounced by him.

Our cultural space is moving towards Fascism and everywhere we see various types of moral policing, corruption, racism, human rights violation, and, sadly enough, individuals as well as organizations follow the same path. But how do we respond to these human and cultural violations of our times? Even if we respond, what is the scale of it? In this age of social media and networking platforms, our responses become more of virtual than real, thus losing its spirit. Now, our responses are confined to a group mail or a Facebook message. And this work is a self-introspection and reflection of that situation only. No one knows better about what we know about our future and the tabulations that we undergo while writing every single line, because it is beyond the gamut of knowledge of anyone else around us. Only we know what all we do not like about the present and why it is so. That is why all manifestos are best at denunciation. And, as for future, only we have certainty that what we do will have unintended consequences. Here comes the question as to whose contemporary are we, and what is meant by the connotation of this ‘whose’ and ‘what’? What I want to read through my works is the social and political rejection, which has been prevalent here since long. It is more like a dialogue, a conversation. Hence, I have adopted an archaic style of animation in this work so that it would not stand up and immediately declare one’s intend.