BOUNDLESS
from the collection of Payal and Anurag Khanna
30 July – 1 August, 2021
In our third edition of the SOUTH SOUTH FILM Programme we present a selection of films from the collection of Payal and Anurag Khanna. These nine works were created by artists from very different contexts, geographies and backgrounds; they all come together in the pushing of limits—be it the bounds of narrative, cultural and sexual norms, or of aesthetic or artistic vision. In this programme we are afforded a rare opportunity to view works that form the core of a remarkable collection of moving image works, but also which represent many starting or turning points for the artists presented.
SOUTH SOUTH is grateful for the support of Payal and Anurag Khanna, all the artists who granted access to their works, as well as the support of their galleries, in particular Project 88, Chatterjee & Lal.
Sonia Khurana
Bird, 1999
Hi8
1 min 10 sec, looping, no sound
On the significance of feminist discourses for her work, Khurana says: “I work with a discourse of power that is deliberately tangential. Even as I try to re-map established realms, my natural predilection is to do this through deliberately poetic intimations, through which I persistently explore and re-define the space of the political. I like to believe that anyone who engages with their own humanity, and to whom equality is integral, is feminist.”
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The film Bird shows the artist herself trying, defying the earth’s gravitational pull, to ascend like a roundish bird that has lost its power but not its will to fly. The humour, the effervescence and simultaneous ponderousness, tells of a hopeless but insatiable longing for freedom and levity.
BIO:
Sonia Khurana is one of India’s most discussed performance artists, using her body, physical movement and sound in the practice of her art to explore situational contexts and underlying realities.
Khurana studied art in London at the Royal College of Art, where she completed her Masters in 1999, and earlier in Delhi at the Delhi College of art. In 2002, Sonia completed a two-year Residency Programme for practice-based research at the Rijksakademie VanBeeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam.
After returning from the UK, Sonia made her debut solo exhibition, consisting of moving image works, in Delhi, India, in 2000. The exhibition, “Lone women don’t lie”, is one of the earliest exhibitions of the moving image in the Indian context.
Her works have been shown in Europe during the exhibition elles@Centre Pompidou (2009/2010), in the United States during the Global Feminisms exhibition in Brooklyn (2007), and in several biennales in Asia including the Aichi triennale (2010), the Busan biennale (2004) and the Gwangju biennale (2008) as well as appearing in the seminal exhibition “West Heavens” in Shanghai (2010).
Her single channel video Bird, produced in 1999 while she was at the Royal College of Arts in London placed her both within the feminist discourse, as well as among the emerging generation of artists working with digital media.
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Kiran Subbaiah
Suicide Note, 2006 – 2013
video
26 minutes, sound
In Suicide Note, a multi-themed, meta-narrative video, Kiran Subbaiah functions as author, director, main and supporting character, camera man and editor.
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BIO:
Kiran Subbaiah was born in Sidapur, Coorg District, Karnataka, India. He completed his undergraduate studies in Fine Arts (sculpture) at Kala Bhavana, in Santiniketan, India; in 1994 he received an MFA at M.S. University in Baroda, India and in 1999 he finished an MFA in sculpture at the Royal College of Art (London, UK). He has shown extensively internationally including solo presentations at Images Gallery (Bangalore), the Kent Institute of Art & Design (Canterbury) and chatterjee & lal (Mumbai). Group exhibitions include the Summer Show, RCA (London, 1999), Media Arts Asia Pacific Festival (Beijing, 2002), 10th Biennale de l’Image en mouvement, Centre pour l’image contemporaine (Geneva, 2004), Mori Museum (Tokyo, 2008), Sherman Art Foundation, Sydney; Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane, 2009), Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2011), Dhaka Art Summit (Dhaka, 2014), among many others. He has since retired from the art world and grows coffee.
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Tejal Shah & Anuj Vaidya
Chingari Chumma / Stinging Kisses, 2000
digital video
8 min 30 sec, colour, sound
ARTISTS’ NOTE: This film contains sexually explicit materials and is of a provocative nature. The artists provides the following contextual material to accompany the showing:
The Unicorn and the Larva: In Conversation
Within the context of post-pornography, Chingari Chumma/Stinging Kisses dives head first into the unaddressed spaces of desire that Hindi cinema/Bollywood narratives dare not touch.
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We engage the language of these films, while complicating their formulaic narrative by displacing the archetypal relationships that are played out within them and this destabilises the subjectivity of the viewer. What is staged is a consensual fantasy where gender roles, the flow of desire and sexual expectations are not in congruence with the norm. This brings us into a queerly fantastical world where nothing can be fixed any longer thus testing the edges of our comfort. We serve this up, hot and piping, with heavily aestheticised music and high camp.
BIOS:
Tejal Shah and Anuj Vaidya are friends and collaborators in the process of (un)becoming with each other. Tejal currently resides in Himachal Pradesh, India, where they are pursuing their passion in researching/studying Non-duality (via Tibetan Buddhist) & manifesting an online community & educational project intersecting non-duality with arts, science & activism, amongst other adventures. Anuj is a teacher/student of performance/media and multispecies anthropology, currently living in California. They are both invested in art as a vehicle for building community, challenging normativity, and cultivating joy. You can find more info about their work at the following websites: www.tejalshah.in and handspuncinema.wordpress.com
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SESSION TWO
Naoyoki Tsuji
Children of Shadows, 2006
Charcoal drawing animation transferred to DVD
18 min
This is a story of an elder brother and his younger sister. One day, they were nearly eaten by their father and they rushed out of the house. They drive their father’s black car, and came round a wilderness.
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Giant… Witch…
A steam locomotive run carrying a huge cake… The children kept transforming their body shapes again and again…
Based on “Hänsel und Gretel”, by the Brothers Grimm.
Presented by the Aichi Arts Center
Executive Producer: Takashi Echigoya
Music, Sound compose ; performance: Makiko Takanashi
Processing lab: YOKOCINE D.I.A
BIO: Naoyuki Tsuji was born in Shizuoka, Japan and lives in Yokohama. He received a BFA from Tokyo Zokei University in 1995. His work has been shown internationally, including solo presentations at the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation (LA, Chicago, Brooklyn, 2018), Tomio Koyama Gallery (Kyoto, 2009), Corvi-Mora (London, 2008) and at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2007). Group exhibitions include “Pandemic Eyeworks: Experimental Animation Under Lockdown” (online, 2020), the 2016 Image Forum Festival in various cities across Japan, the International Animation Festival (Greece, 2015) and at the Azad Art Gallery (Teheran, 2014).
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Victor Alimpiev
Whose is this exhalation?, 2008
single channel video, loop
15 min 9 sec
From May, 28 to July, 28 the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation held Victor Alimpiev’s first retrospective exhibition “Whose is this Exhalation?”.
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The exhibition provided an overall insight into the artist’s painting and the medium’s relation to Alimpiev’s videos. The show was presented as a kind of dialogue of genres, guiding the audience from painting to video and underscoring their inextricable connection in Alimpiev’s oeuvre. The repetition of subject and image is as essential for the artist as rhyme in poetry. The structure of Alimpiev’s painting with its repetitive forms is similar to choreography: it is like the pattern of a dance, a simulacrum of a breathing rhythm or heartbeat. The artist invites the audience to study the identical images – after all it is the very ability to discern that enables one to create exact replicas.
BIO: Victor Alimpiev (b. 1973, Moscow, Russia) lives and works in Moscow. He graduated from Moscow Academic Art College, Moscow State Pedagogical University, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Moscow, and also completed a two-month course at Valand Academy, Gothenburg. Solo exhibitions include: Radiant, Regina Gallery, Moscow (2015); Selected Works, High Line Art, New York (2014); There’s Nothing Behind You, Winzavod Center for Contemporary Arts, Moscow (2013); Traces, Centre d’Art Passerelle, Brest (2011); Malerei, Kunstverein Monchengladbach (2010); To Trample Down an Arable Land, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Red October, Moscow, Studio la Città, Verona (2009); and Whose is this Exhalation?, Ekaterina Cultural Foundation, Moscow (2008). Group exhibitions include: House of Impressions: Wandering with a Troubadour, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (2016); Borsch and Champagne, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2016); The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th Venice Biennale, Venice (2013); 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2013); Stage Presence: Theatricality in Art and Media, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2012); Ostalgia, New Museum, New York (2011); and Modernikon, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2010).
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Shahryar Nashat
Plaque (Slab), 2007
SD video, color, with sound
9 min 40 sec
The notion of ideas and material “taking shape” is integral to Shahryar Nashat’s single-channel video work, Plaque (Slab).
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Despite the slab’s enigmatic form and its literal and metaphoric weightiness, it is not really the subject of this work. In fact, this cold, abstract object was made to the artist’s specifications for no purpose other than to document its production. Seeing the video in Berlin, where it was made, activated all kinds of associations, given the abundance of prefabricated slab buildings —Plattenbau — in East Germany. Perhaps such associations were simply born of the dense and dexterous pseudo-neutrality of utilitarian concrete, the substance (next to steel and glass) that is arguably the material of built modernities, regardless of ideological persuasion. (Adapted from a text by Dominic Eichler, published in Bidoun (Winter 2008).)
Shahryar Nashat has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2020); SMK—Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark (2019); Swiss Institute, New York (2019); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2017); Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany (2016); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2016); Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2015); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2014); Kunstverein Nürnberg, Germany (2010); and Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland (2009). Recent and notable group exhibitions include Honestly Speaking: The Word, the Body and the Internet, Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand (2020); Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016); Le Grand Balcon, La Biennale de Montréal (2016); 8th Berlin Biennale (2014); and ILLUMInations, 54th Venice Biennale, Italy (2011). His work is in the permanent collections of a number of museums worldwide, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo (GAMeC), Turin, Italy; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland; Art Institute of Chicago; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Nashat lives and works in Los Angeles.
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Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg
The Natural Selection, 2006
Claymation
11 min 30 sec
Nathalie Djurberg is best known for producing claymation short films that are faux-naïve, but graphically violent and erotic. In The Natural Selection the abuse of power is played out along racial and ethnic lines.
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Mixing animation, sculpture and sound, Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg create psychologically charged scenarios dealing with human and animalistic desires. Since 2001, Djurberg has developed a distinctive style of filmmaking, using clay animation to dramatise the basest of natural instincts from jealousy, revenge and greed, to submission and lust. Her partner, the musician and composer Hans Berg, conjures up the atmospheric sound effects and scores the hypnotic music for Djurberg’s animations and installations. In 2004 they began working closely together as a duo to create transgressive narratives rich in symbolic meaning and emotional reach, mining allegorical myths and grotesque, nightmarish visions in pieces. The artists’ interdisciplinary collaborations increasingly blur the cinematic, the sculptural and the performative in immersive environments that pair moving images and musical compositions with related set pieces or built objects.
Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg currently live and work in Berlin, Germany. Born in Lysekil, Sweden in 1978, Nathalie Djurberg received her MFA from Malmö Art Academy, Sweden in 2002. Hans Berg was born in Rättvik, Sweden in 1978 and is a musician, producer and composer, working mainly with electronic music.
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SESSION THREE
The Otolith Group
Otolith III, 2009
HD video, colour, sound
48 min
Otolith III takes The Alien, the unrealised screenplay of the legendary Bengali director Satyajit Ray, as its point of departure. Written in 1967, The Alien would have been the first science fiction film to be set in contemporary India.
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Otolith III returns to 1967 to propose an alternative trajectory in which the fictional protagonists of The Alien attempt to seize the means of production in order to create the conditions for their existence as images.
Filmed in London, Otolith III is an experiment in temporal and geographical displacement which The Group call a premake, a remake of a film before the original.
BIO: The Otolith Group was founded in 2002.
Its work is research based and spans the moving image, audio, performance, installation, and curation. It incorporate film making and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the environmental conditions of life we all face.
Approaching curation as an artistic practice of building intergenerational and cross-cultural platforms, the collective has been influential in critically introducing particular works of artists such as Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Anand Patwardhan, Etel Adnan, Black Audio Film Collective, Sue Clayton, Mani Kaul, Peter Watkins, and Chimurenga in the UK, US, Europe, and Lebanon.
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Matthias Müller
Alpsee, 1994
16mm / HD mp4, colour, sound
15 min
A childhood in the ’60s. A heart beats in the cabinet. Voices rain down on the city. A tree grows on planet Mars. It’s a miracle.
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“Photographed with an exquisite eye for interiors and restless invention, Alpsee stages a boy’s coming of age, that painful rend between infant dependency and mature individuation. Nearly wordless, Müller proceeds by analogy and synecdoche, gathering up precisely framed moments within the home and collecting them as evidence. Its gorgeous chromatic scheme and high key lighting mark a significant departure from Müller’s narrow gauge efforts of the 80s.”
(text adapted from review by Mike Hoolboom, Millenium Film Journal, New York City 1997)
BIO: Matthias Müller was born in Bielefeld, Germany, in 1961. He is an artist working in film, video, installation and photography. His films have screened in major film festivals worldwide including the festivals at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, Locarno, Oberhausen, and Rotterdam. Müller’s work has also been featured in several group and solo exhibitions. Since 1999, many of his works have been co-directed with Christoph Girardet. Since 2003, he has been teaching as Professor in Experimental Film at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne. Müller’s works are held in collections such as, among others, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Goetz Collection, Munich, the collection of Isabelle and Jean-Conrad Lemaître, Paris, the Servais Family Collection, Brussels, the Khanna Family Collection, Kutch, and Tate Modern, London.
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Collecting is a love story, the only difference is you are in love with many works and artists at the same time. As you age and your learning deepens—with art this comes from a lot of reading, looking, introspection, understanding—and your sixth sense improves to an extent that your belief in some works and artists gets stronger and many a time your gut starts to guide you to directions you must seek going forward.
As I looked at these works, planning the show at SOUTH SOUTH, I felt just like any other person in the audience, who on these three days might click on a link and watch a video or two, maybe make notes to get deeper into the world of these artists and their practice. I’ve spent years collecting, keeping the works safe, but have not visited them often after acquiring them. This puts me in the same situation as these viewers being newly introduced to them. I’m no different.
If you look into all these works they have overlaps, they are webs among webs, they are interconnected at so many social, political, personal and artistic levels. And even if some of them might be very distant from one another in terms of year of creation, geographic setting or political context, when I view them all today I find such fluidity in the works, artists and their minds, and even mine, still trying to navigate life, learn from others, become more humane, more giving, more accepting and learning to appreciate another kind of world and life.
– Anurag Khanna
SHOWING ONE
