Individual Artists
Project Cinema City engaged with the urban chroniclers in the field of visual art - in search of the city that produces the materiality and the vocabulary of urban visual culture through its cinema and then, replicates itself through that process. The invited artists had brought in their own preoccupations and subjective engagements with the city into the euphoric agenda of the project.
Anant Joshi
Untitled / Toy City
Sculptural Installation, 98 sets of wooden objects on a wooden table. Size: 16 x 4 x height 3 ft
A sculptural installation with wooden toys shaped in the forms of fireworks, arms, knobs, locks etc. The toys are hand painted and also in certain places pasted with laser stickers. Each toy is fitted with a motor that makes them rotate. There are multiple consoles each with 100 such toys. In each console half of the toys move clockwise and the other half anti-clockwise. While standing still each console resembles an urban settlement but while rotating they create a friction of edgy energy and movements conducive to metropolitan life.
Atul Dodiya
14 Stations of Villains
Oil, acrylic with marble dust and crackle medium on canvas. Sizes: 42 x 96 inch and 51 x 63 inch
Train station signboards along the Mumbai Central Railway Line are painted with portraits of popular Bollywood villains and one vamp. Between Ghatkopar (the home of the artist) and CST (Victoria Terminus) there are 13 stations – the artist has added a new one to the list: Atul Station.
Archana Hande
Of Panorama: A Riding Exercise
Interactive video installation; video projection, two cameras, lights and a gym cycle
This is a tribute to the convention of painted backdrop in the early cinema. Set up like an indoor studio floor, the installation has a screen on which an animation film of painted cityscapes is projected. As a gym cycle, placed in front of the screen, gets activated by the spectator/cyclist, two cameras shoot the cyclist and throw the image back on the screen into the animation film. The composite image fakes the cyclist as a protagonist of the road movie.
Kausik Mukhopadhyay
Bioscope
Interactive sculpture of wood, acrylic sheets, motors and texts. Size: 6 x 6 x height 4 ft
Text snippets by Madhusree Dutta.
This is a re-configuration of the beginning of motion picture at the turn of the previous century. Inside the bioscope rotates three layers of images of the city and the matinee icons. In the foreground is a mechanical device that can be activated by the viewer/s by pressing a switch. The device churns snippets from history, oral testimonies and anecdotes on the growth of the city and evolution of its cinema, and then displays them in random orders. As the viewers play with the bioscope, they playfully yet proactively, get involved in re-configuring the history… as well as in a game of developing narratives crisscrossing the time zones.
Paromita Vohra
So Near Yet So Far
Sound Installation in 3 listening stations: a PBX set, public telephone and STD booth
Like the city and the cinema, and so many other enterprises of modernity, the advent of the telephone allowed you to be somewhere you were not. By disembodying the voice from the body, and embodying the body in the voice, the telephone became the enchanted glass through which to cross boundaries of many kinds: social, gendered, sexual. Love, sex, danger and the forbidden - often expressed around telephones, telephone operators, women, machines and modern girls. The listening stations and the instruments invoke both the physical experience and the associative memories.
Pushpamala N.
Return of the Phantom Lady
Performance Photography in colour prints, 21 frames in giclee prints. Size: 24.5 x 34.5 inch each.
This is a sequel to Phantom Lady or Kismet (1996-98), a photo narrative in film noir style where the artist played – Phantom lady and her doppelganger, the lost twin sister, the Vamp. This time round, while rescuing an orphaned school girl, the Phantom Lady runs into the mafia and their land grab operations – thus, begins a chase through old film theatres, slums and glass screened office blocks.
Shreyas Karle
Museum Shop of Fetish Objects: Objects-sculptures in brass, copper, aluminum and marble. Multiple sizes
A speculative museum of cinema at the time of post-cinema.
The artist has made a series of strange objects that appear familiar by giving shapes to various fetishes foregrounded by Bollywood – human anatomy, garments, props, character typology, axioms, behavioral logic, sensory responses, disguised desires and so on. The sculptural objects, along with corresponding sketches, scribbles, diaries, found objects and images, are displayed in a mock museum setting. A whole range of strategies, borrowed from the conventions of popular cinema – fake, lookalike, replica, simulation, cut-out, camouflage, caricature, double entendre – are applied to ‘object’ify the cinematic.
