curated by Bharati Kapadia, Chandita Mukherjee and Anuj Daga
FIELDS OF VISION
Screen spaces define and describe new geographies of inhabitation in our times, especially since the onset of the pandemic. ‘Fields of Vision’ presents an array of visual experiments by contemporary video practitioners of Indian origin that expand our imaginative geography. The works will be displayed in four interpolated fields: art-science, body-desire, real-imagined and hetero-urban. The pluralising of the singular ‘field’ into the multiple ‘fields’ has a number of implications. It proposes widening of perspectives, multiplying vectors of viewing, and discovering new directions for wandering, pause and inhabitation. 121 videos by 78 artists, shown in four chapters over the four weeks of the VAICA festival will chart new coordinates through which the makers rephrase, re-engineer and perhaps puncture our normalised field of vision.
Opening Launch and Orientation with curators Bharati Kapadia, Chandita Mukherjee, Anuj Daga, advisor Tina Paul and Managing Trustee & Director Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Tasneem Mehta
on 20 Nov 2021, 7:00 pm
Week 1
21 – 27 Nov 2021
Cartographies of Sensation
The first set of videos under ‘Fields of Vision’ attempts to locate the cartographies of sensation – those that attempt to map the coordinates of experience, observation, perception and artistic production. In these mappings, moving images play between the polarities of science and fiction. They become vehicles of thought and speculation interweaving science with artifice – relocating the boundaries of awareness of the self and its surroundings. The moving images slow down time, make us pause, repeat and reconsider, or suspend us in a limbo towards opening new ways to sense the world. Through such awareness, one may begin to demarcate a space for expanded consciousness in the highly fraught present.
Week 2
28 Nov – 4 Dec 2021
Orbits of Desire
‘The Orbits of Desire’ brings together video works that explore subjects of gender, relationships and performances that are circumscribed by bodily acts. The body is the medium through which we make memories or express our inner desires. What fragments of time become worthy of preserving, to what extent does one stretch limits of performativity, how do we inhabit memory and what are our limits of retention? These are questions that the videos in this section address. In the artists’ hands, the videos become sites of retention and release and effectively preserve the archives of our temporal bodies. In orchestrating strategic encounters with time, they allow us to rediscover our desires.
Week 3
5 – 11 Dec 2021
Peripheries of the Real
This segment puts together video experiments that explore environmental aspects, especially in the context of the growing awareness of irreversible change. Many of these signs remain unattended or even lost to viewers’ due to excessive immersion or inadvertent neglect. The virtual space today extends our awareness into the digital netherworld. Such conditions highlight instances of not only parallel realities but also the surreal, hyperreal or para-real. The pandemic inverted humanity’s sense of security by locking us within our homes and producing an irrational fear of the outside world. We found that absences and presences interchanged their roles in our existences. The videos here attempt to bring us to terms with a sense that the fields of reality that we encounter seem to be bound by a mythical horizon.
Week 4
12 – 18 Dec 2021
Urban Heterotopias
Urban heterotopias make themselves apparent most vividly through the videoscapes in this set of works. These spaces create their own psycho-geographies within the shared domain of the city. Inevitably, the city is the most charged site for the performance of politics. It is the ground where multiple ideologies collide, intertwine, repel and dance with each other. What are some forms of co-habitation and contestation that take place within the city? The videos in the concluding session closely contemplate the urban condition as well as actions that consistently rework the landscapes of our everyday encounters. Can these revelations readdress our equation with the urban space, and alter our fields of vision?
vaica.org 