To See is to Change
01.03.2024 – 27.04.2024

RMIT Culture’s Design Hub Gallery presents Bombay Tilts Down, 2022 and A Photogenetic Line, 2019 by renowned Mumbai-based artist group CAMP.
In this pair of large-scale works, CAMP explore two sides of their practice; one that produces experimental film and video, often with unusual equipment and angles of participation, and another that creates and animates archives of moving images, documents and photography. The two works are united by their re-spatialisation of places and history and by becoming temporal structures of what could be or could have been. Both suggest, in a reworked cinematic tradition, that seeing is not passive and can reassemble concrete realities.

Bombay Tilts Down (2022, 13 mins, 6+1 screens) was filmed with a 4K CCTV camera from a single point on a 36-floor building in central Mumbai, while being watched by people in the city below.

A Photogenetic Line (2017, cutout photographic montage) assembles photographs from the archive of The Hindu, a left-leaning Indian national newspaper, in a sequence where “one photograph calls the next'', via a series of rules. In this allusion to a filmic edit, we walk through small and big historical events with their original captions, now inside a non-narrative, unstable and eerie political assemblage.

CAMP

CAMP is a collaborative studio founded in Bombay in 2007. It has been producing fundamental new work in film and video, electronic media, and public art forms, in a practice characterised by a hand-dirtying, non-alienated relation to technology. CAMP's projects have entered many modern social and technical assemblies: Energy, communication, transport and surveillance systems, ports, ships, archives – things much larger than itself. These are shown as unstable, leaky, and contestable "technology", in the ultimate sense of not having a fixed-function or destiny, making them both a medium and stage for artistic activity.

From their home base in Mumbai, they co-host the online archives pad.ma (est. 2008) and indiancine.ma (est. 2013) and run a rooftop cinema for the past 15 years.

CAMP’s artworks have been exhibited worldwide, including recent performances at M+, Hong Kong (2023) and MoMA, New York (2023) and solos at Sharjah Art Foundation, (2022) Nam June Paik Art Center (2021), Argos Center for Art and Media, Brussels, and the De Appel Gallery, Amsterdam (2019); at Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017), Documenta 13 (2012) and Documenta 14 film program (2017), in the streets and markets of Bangalore, San Jose, Dakar, Mexico City, Jerusalem, Kolkata, Kabul, Delhi, Ljubljana and Bombay; in the biennials of Shanghai, Sharjah, Gwangju, Taipei, Singapore, Liverpool, Chicago, Lahore and Kochi-Muziris; at film platforms like the BFI London Film Festival, Viennale, FID Marseille, Flaherty Seminar and the Anthology Film Archives, and in art institutions such as Khoj, Sarai-CSDS, KNMA, Lalit Kala Akademi and NGMA New Delhi, Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Bombay, MoMA, New Museum, Queens Museum and e-flux New York, Tate Modern, Serpentine Galleries, and Gasworks London, HKW Berlin, Ars Electronica, Linz, MoMA Warsaw, Ashkal Alwan Beirut, Palestinian Museum, Birzeit, M+ Hongkong, SeMA, Seoul Museum of Art, Art Jameel, Dubai to name a few. In October 2020 they were awarded the 7th Nam June Paik Centre Prize.

CAMP, an RMIT Culture production at RMIT’s Design Hub Gallery. Co-programmed by Dr Shweta Kishore (RMIT School of Media and Communication)

[Image: CAMP, Bombay Tilts Down, 2022, 13 min. 14 sec. looped, seven-channel environment with music.
Filmed by CCTV camera from a single-point location in South-Central Mumbai.]

Public Program

READING, LISTENING, SEEING

Bombay Tilts Down and A Photogenetic Line

Tuesday 12 March, 5:30 – 7PM

An artist-led tour of the multi-channel film work, and the photo assemblage presented by CAMP followed by a conversation with the artists and audience moderated by Dr. Shweta Kishore (RMIT School of Media and Communication).

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What the Cameras saw and Remembered: two films by CAMP

Saturday 16 March, 1 – 4PM

We invite you to a rare opportunity to watch two acclaimed films by Mumbai based artist group CAMP

CAMP’s film works employ distinct video materials and methods to explore entanglements between medium, message and the politics of looking. Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar (The Neighbor before the House) and From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf are emblematic of Camp’s experimentation with the moving image and its technological and production architectures. A foundation of ethics materialises alternate modes of image making, voice, and subject position, responding to fundamental questions around representation of real people particularly those who are either underrepresented or overrepresented in media products in ways that divest personal agency.

The Neighbour Before the House (60 minutes, 2009-2011)

In The Neighbour Before the House, eight Palestinian families in Jerusalem survey their neighbourhood using CCTV cameras mounted on their homes; the returned gaze of surveillance posing disquieting questions about the observer-observed relationship. As the observers narrate their visual exploration, we are invited to consider both, the nature of operational images and subject-positions of citizens.

From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf [83 mins. Original format(s): HDV, SDV, VHS, Cellphone videos (variable). Stereo audio and in-cameraphone music]

From Gulf… is a feature-length travelogue by sea filmed using mobile phones by sea faring traders from Sindh, Baluchistan and Southern Iran over several years. The film provides a rare glimpse into ordinary yet intimate worlds of oceanic trade and media flows beyond the vocabulary of crisis, borders, and sanctions.

The programme includes an introduction by curator, Shweta Kishore and artists, Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran.

The event is programmed by RMIT Culture in partnership with Dr Shweta Kishore (School of Media and Communication)

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