Nov 17, 2012

WHEN SHANKAR NAG COMES ASKING

Project Cinema City and Kowdi invite you to the Preview of

WHEN SHANKAR NAG COMES ASKING
Documentary, Kannada with English subtitles, 70 min, 2012, India


Date: 24th November, Saturday, 4pm
Venue: National Gallery of Modern Art, Bengaluru
Manikyavelu Mansion, 49 Palace Road



Synopsis

Bangalore could be any other metropolis of India. The lives of the autodrivers in the documentary could be survival stories of vulnerable millions in many big cities right across the world. The twist in Bangalore’s tale is Shankar Nag. No other city has an actor who died 20 years ago, still breathing through autoricksha windshields.
WHEN SHANKAR NAG COMES ASKING is an album about today’s Bangalore. In the race to become a ‘global’ city, the struggle is as much in holding on to the familiar as it is about embracing the new. In what ways does one seek the familiar, when the familiar is not the same anymore? What does it take for Ramanna, Mahadeva and the Autodrivers at Shankar Nag Auto Stand, 8th Main Road, Basaveshwarnagar, to ‘belong’ in Bangalore today? How does Shankar Nag fit into this story about identity and belonging?


Produced by Kowdi
Directed by Sushma Veerappa
Camera - Vinod Raja
Sound – Arun Rama Varma
Editors – Sushma Veerappa with Vasanth Kumar D
Animations – Archana Hande
 

This is a part of Project Cinema City film screenings.

Jun 4, 2012

Project Cinema City

Project Cinema City
                      Research Art & Documentary Practices

2012
National Gallery of Modern Art
Ministry of Culture, Government of India
Majlis
presents

Curator–Producer Madhusree Dutta
Co-Curator  Archana Hande
Architects  Rohan Shivkumar and Apurva Parikh
Designers Kausik Mukhopadhay and Shikha Pandey
Consultant s Kaushik Bhaumik and Shreyas Mhaskar



Table of Miscellany
Collaborative compilation and installation of photographs, texts, maps

Installation: Shikha Pandey and Paroma Sadhana
Photos: Amit Madheshiya, Avijit Mukul Kishore, Mamta Murthy, Sameer Tawde, Kruti Kothari, Simran Dhaliwal
Atlas: Design Cell of KRVIA
Dossier on ‘Cinema City Lived’: Rohan Shivkumar (editor), Abhinav Shaw (design), Hansa Thapliyal (text)
Timeline: Madhusree Dutta and Shilpa Gupta







Books that are not written, magazines that are fossilized, maps that are constantly being altered, texts that are fluid, photos that capture the ephemeral -- all collated within a structure that is a library-cum-laboratory look-alike. The monochromatic formality of the structure and the fleeting characteristics of the objects represent the inherent frictions in the proclamation of archiving the contemporary.





Bioscope
A game of Cinema–City–Modernity Timeline

Artist: Kausik Mukhopadhay with Amruta Sakalkar
Text: Madhusree Dutta

Snippets of information, gossip, lore and tales swivel around the cityscape and images of urban icons. The game is to create a tangible narrative by arranging appropriate series of data through an interactive device.










The Calendar Project
Iconography in the 20th Century

Artists: Abeer Gupta, Amit Roy, Archana Hande, Arpita Singh, Bhupen Khakkar, B.V. Suresh, Chhatrapati Datta, Chintan Upadhyay, Christina Zuck, Deepshikha Jaiswal, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Hema Upadhyay, Kamal Swaroop, Mamta Murthy, Meera Devidayal, Mithu Sen, Nalini Malani, Nilima Sheikh, Paromita Vohra, Ranbir Kaleka, Ram Rahman, Riddhi Shah, Sachin Kondhalkar, Shakuntala Kulkarni, Sumitro Basak, Shilpa Gupta, Shreyas Karle, Sudhir Patwardhan, Sukhdev Rathod, Tushar Joag, Vinita Gatne, Vishal Rawlley, Vivan Sundaram
Production team: Afrah Shafiq, Kevat Pad, Rupal Shah

A collaborative project to re-negotiate the process of iconization of contemporary images in the public domain through the 20th century. The works are mostly based on found images or on earlier works of the artists themselves, which are then hybridized with contemporary readings and speculations on the public and the popular.
The inconspicuous-looking individual works gain temporality and attain a special kind of exuberance when collated and placed together.











Pushpamala N

Return of the Phantom Lady (Sinful City)
a photo-romance

created by: Pushpamala N
photography: Clay Kelton




This is the second adventure of the Phantom Lady, a sequel to Phantom Lady or Kismet (1996–98), a black-and-white thriller shot in the film noir style.

This time the Phantom Lady gets caught in a dark web of murder, intrigue and foul play in contemporary Mumbai. While rescuing an orphaned schoolgirl, she encounters the land mafia and their land-grab operations that unfold through the sites of old movie theatres, artisans’ settlements in slums, and new, glass-facaded office blocks. Return is a look at the new Mumbai






So Near Yet So Far

Sound installation with telephone instruments, 3 listening stations with PBX set, public telephone and STD booth


Paromita Vohra
Engineering: Bhaskar Pal
Sound post: Tarun Sahani

Similar to the city and the cinema, the telephone is a part of the fantasy machine culture that allows one to be something else, somewhere else, to travel without moving. The three consoles trespass real space in three different ways – by impersonating, by creating a private space in the public, and by sampling that which is heart-racingly forbidden.





Fourteen Stations

Paintings in oil, acrylic with marble dust and crackle medium on canvas


Atul Dodiya



Station signboards along the Mumbai Central railway line are painted with portraits of popular Bollywood villains. Between Ghatkopar (the residence of the artist) and CST (Victoria Terminus) there are 13 stations – the artist has added one to the list.
14 Stations of the Cross turn into 14 stations of the iconic villains of Bollywood.







Untitled

a settlement of moving objects made of teak-wood

Anant Joshi

The imagination of the city of dizzying speed and escalating desire is replicated in an installation of moving wooden objects that are shaped in the form of firecrackers and painted/printed in the idiom of matchbox labels. The objects also resemble threaded spindles, the base for production in the textile industry – the erstwhile nerve
centre of the city.
The high speed of movement makes the objects ephemeral and yet desirable, much like matinee idols who are often referred to as patakas – firecrackers.











Vastusangrahalaya ki Dukan (Museum Shop of Fetish Objects)

Object-sculptures


Shreyas Karle


A speculative museum of cinema at the time of post-cinema.
Various fetishes foregrounded by Bollywood Рthe human anatomy, garments, props, home d̩cor, spoken words Рare made into sculptural objects cast in brass, copper and aluminum. These objects, along with sketches, scribbles, diaries and found images, are displayed in a museum-like setting.











Cinema City Lived
Map of the city made of a network of PVC pipes with graphics, models and objects

Structure: Rohan Shivkumar and Apurva Parikh
Objects: Apurva Talpade, Elizabeth Mathew and Shivani Shedde
Water front image: Apoorva Iyenger and Chetan Kulkarni
Train image: Kruti Kothari

A compilation of the marks of cinema on the body of the city.
The pipeline network is conceived as the stitching pattern that holds the map of the cinema city together – tracing production units, shooting studios, exhibition theatres, locations of desires and utility and their interfaces.  





Of Panorama: A Riding Exercise
Video animation and interactive installation

Artist: Archana Hande
Animation rendering: Anand Bhutkar
Technical consultant: Abeer Gupta

Reincarnating the genre of film shooting with painted backdrops for landscapes, the installation invites the viewer to participate in the process of image reproduction. Through the contemporary video device the viewer can opt to be a part of animated outdoor images while comfortably placed within an indoor space.







May 11, 2012

Project Cinema City



On behalf of National Gallery of Modern Art and Majlis we cordially invite you to the opening of exhibition Project Cinema City: Research Art and Documentary Practices on 19th May 2012, 6.00pm at NGMA Mumbai. The exhibition commemorates 100 years of Indian cinema.

Project Cinema City, an interdisciplinary project initiated by Majlis, is realized  in collaboration with KRVIA (Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture) and more than 100 artists, filmmakers, architects and cultural study scholars. The exhibition will be on till 29th June, 2012 (Mondays and national holidays closed). Ten Cinema City documentaries will be screened at NGMA auditorium on every Saturday-Sunday on 1-5 pm starting from 26th May.

Following the opening there will be a seminar on Archiving the Contemporary on 20th May 2012, 2-7 pm at NGMA auditorium.  The key note speakers are Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Director, Arsenal - Institute of Film and Video Art, Berlin and Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Director, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata.

Archana Hande
Co-curator

Mar 5, 2012

Zerox Me

Zerox me - why somebody should zerox me?

Xerox company also tried stopping people using the word "xerox" shouldn't be used in adv or in a public space as it is a name of the company and not a dictionary word. and whoever wants to use has to pay hugely to the company.

Hmm fools -- they don't realize how much free publicity they have got. They don't need to spend a penny promoting their product.

India is too clever we all called it Zerox - so it made a mark in the dictionary and also no penny spent. from Carbon copy to Zerox copy.