*The Dispute at the Dam Site*
- Sanjay Kak - (1958)
Video/ 19" screen/ 5' 30"/ sound
Production year: 2006
Production credits: Camera: Sanjay Kak Sound: Samina Mishra
Courtesy: Artist
This video is an elaboration of a sequence in Words on Water (2002), Sanjay Kak's documentary about a two-decade peoples' movement against big dams in the Narmada River Valley in central India.
A dam site is a crater. A dispute - between a people who live by a river and a state apparatus intent on taming the river and evicting its people - is a fault-line. The crater fills with people and is hollowed out again. A confrontation between democracy, dams and a district collector becomes a tremor. Valleys empty and cities wait to be filled in.
Sanjay Kak is a filmmaker. He lives and works in Delhi.
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*Gurgaon Giraffe*
- Ruchir Joshi - (1960)
Video/ 19" screen/ 3' 16"
Production year: 2006
Production credits: Camera: Ranjan Palit Editing: Sara Kolster + Iram Ghufran
Courtesy: Artist
An excavator in Gurgaon, a suburb of Delhi marked by factories, 'new economy' workspaces and expensive real estate.
An excavator is a hungry beast. It forages, dancing a slow hypnotic dance, digging the city into becoming, scooping out hillocks of earth with its jaws. Those evicted by dams find their way into the city, only to confront the excavator's hungry jaw, wherever they turn. Evictions breed evictions. Hollow ground makes way for new hollow ground.
Ruchir Joshi is a filmmaker and a writer. He lives and works between Delhi, Kolkata and London.
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Work Title: *Manus*
- Satyajit Pande - (1973)
Video/ 19" screen/ 7"
Production year: 2005
Production credits: Camera: Setu/Satyajit Pande, Editing: Shan Mohammed
Thanks: Amit Choudhury, Surabhi Sharma, Kavita Pai, Sunil Shanbag, Amitabh Kumar
Courtesy: Artist
Manus is the anatomical name for the terminal segment of a forelimb - in humans, the hand and wrist. In colloquial Hindi and Marathi, two languages spoken extensively in Mumbai, 'manus' also means 'human being'.
Mumbai's suburban railway network ferries millions of commuters every day, and epitomises the tenuous grip that the inhabitants of Mumbai have on their city. Hands in trains create constellations of accidental intimacy, enter found solidarities, speak a vocabulary of silent gestures. A routine of handclasps anchors and cushions the daily uncertainties of a dense metropolis.
Satyajit Pande is a cinematographer and a photographer. He lives and works in Mumbai.
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*City Guide I*
- Solomon Benjamin - (1960)
Lecture performance/ Video/ 14" screen + projection / 17'
Production year: 2005
Production credits: Realised in collaboration with Sarai Media Lab
Editing: Iram Ghufran
Courtesy: Artist + Sarai Media Lab
City Guide I is a 'theory-performance' that uses PowerPoint presentations, research notes and speech to create a dense web of associations and information about transformations in the cities of the south.
Benjamin uses maps, drawings and photographs to tell a fascinating story about the contests between planners and the 'hydra' of informal and improvised urban forms. For Benjamin, this contest shapes the contours of urban reality in many new and emerging cities all over the world.
Solomon Benjamin is an urbanist and architect. He lives and works in Bangalore.
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*Autopoesis*
- Ravikant Sharma - (1967) + Prabhat Kumar Jha - (1967)
Video / projection/ 8'
Production year: 2005
Production credits: Realised in collaboration with Sarai Media Lab
Editing: Iram Ghufran
Courtesy: Artist + Sarai Media Lab
A collection of Found Poetry from auto rickshaw cabs in Delhi opens another pathway into the imaginary of the city.
The streets of Delhi are anthologies of mobile poetry. Auto rickshaw cabs - three-wheel motor scooters and Delhi's most ubiquitous form of personal public transport - are surfaces inscribed with pithy couplets that span a spectrum of sentiment ranging from laconic irony to surreal humour, from gentle heresy to rage and romantic ardour. Auto-poems, read fleetingly as rickshaws speed by, register as precise and personal annotations on the epic text of a vast metropolis.
Ravikant is a historian and writer based at Sarai-CSDS. Prabhat Kumar is a pedagogue and social activist with Ankur Society for Alternatives in Education . Both live in Delhi.
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*In Aladdin's Cave*
- Nancy Adajania - (1971)
Inter-media installation (Digital prints/ text/ slides/ projection)
Production year: 2006
Production credits: Images sourced from Mahendra Camtech and Fotofast, Mumbai.
Research supported by a Sarai-CSDS independent research fellowship.
Courtesy: Artist
In Aladdin's Cave is an archive-installation that emerges from Nancy Adajania's research on popular digital photography.
The photograph is an object poised between the obligation to index reality and the desire for the picturesque and the fantastic. Neighbourhood photo studios in South Asian cities inherit a legacy of intervening on the very surface of the portraits they make for their clients. The cheap and easy availability of digital imaging technologies and software takes this further. The door of the street corner studio becomes a portal to strange new worlds that are within everyone's reach.
Nancy Adajania is a curator and art critic based in Mumbai.
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*A Wall and a Sofa*
- Cybermohalla Ensemble - (2001)
Video/ projection/ 60+ mins
Production year: 2005
Production credits: Cybermohalla Media Lab at Dakshinpuri, Delhi + Sarai Media Lab, Delhi
Courtesy: Ankur Society for Alternatives in Education, Delhi + Sarai/CSDS, Delhi
The Cybermohalla Ensemble, a flexible constellation of young, working-class media practitioners in Delhi, has a five-year history of interventions in informal common spaces and contexts in the city. Their video work is also narrowcast on neighbourhood cable TV networks.
Sometimes an alleyway can become a salon. The inhabitants of crowded cities create islands of conviviality when and where they can. A bench leaning against a wall can become a sofa: an invitation to sit for a while, chat, relax and relish the passage of time in the course of a busy day.
Cybermohalla is a collaborative process initiated by Sarai-CSDS and Ankur.
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*Ectropy Index*
- Sarai Media Lab - (2000) (Jeebesh Bagchi, Mrityunjoy Chaterjee, Iram Ghufran, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta)
Interactive hypertext infoface/ projection and computer
Production year: 2005
Production credits: Research support from Taha Mahmood
Courtesy: Sarai Media Lab, Sarai/CSDS
Ectropy Index is the third in the series of interactive info-face works made by the Sarai Media Lab over the last five years. Like Global Village Health Manual 1.0 and Network of No_des , it builds an argument through research notes and repurposed cultural material.
"Ectropy" means a general increase in organization. An "ectropy index", therefore, is a measure of the increase of information, or of order, in a given system. Identity cards and identity theft, fingerprints and forgeries, surveillance and shadows, data bodies and data crashes, biometrics and body sculpting seem to define significant features of the topography of our moment. Ectropy Index seeks to create a tension between entropic and ectropic impulses continually contesting the levels of order and systematization within a system.
Sarai Media Lab is based at Sarai-CSDS, Delhi.
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*Sarai.TXT 3.1: City Games*
- Broadsheet Collective - (2004) (Iram Ghufran, Shveta Sarda, Aarti Sethi. Designed with Mrityunjoy Chaterjee)
Broadsheet/ 23 x 36 inches/ folded/ colour
Production year: 2006
Production credits: Produced at Sarai Media Lab + printed by Kunstverein, Stuttgart
Courtesy: Sarai-CSDS, Delhi
City Games is a special edition of Sarai.txt , a periodic experimental publication that interprets and renders research about urban realities.
City Games treats the material and immaterial surfaces of the city as a site for the elaboration of questions and provocations, rather than as a stable structure. It turns the ordered forms of urban space inside-out, and opens up a poetics of the 'interiority' of exposed spaces in the routine of the city.
The Broadsheet Collective and Mrityunjoy Chatterjee are based at Sarai-CSDS, Delhi. |
