India on film

‘India on film’ investigates the relationship between the art and craft of making on ‘film’ through a series of film screenings, workshops and installations.

Opening at the Serendipity Arts Festival 2019, the exhibition showed a cross section of works, all conscious works of ‘Cinema of Prayoga’ by makers like Akbar Padamsee, Ashim Ahluwalia, Ashish Avikunthak, Shai Heredia and Shumona Goel. Along with an 8 day screening schedule was an intensive workshop on working with found footage and its techniques. The installations included a hand cranked 35mm projector connected to a sewing machine and a celluloid selfie booth where one could get their portrait taken in 16mm motion picture film and take a piece of hand developed film along with them.

Curated by Harkat Studios | Lead curator: Karan Suri Talwar

Curatorial

It happened about a decade ago, ‘film’ as a medium was discarded by the film industry, almost overnight. Decades worth of knowledge, equipment and processes were put aside and the craft of ‘making’ a film was sealed shut in boxes, forgotten in storage. The digital age brought on the beautiful democratisation of the moving image, but there was one casualty: its medium.

An entire generation of makers slowly realized that along with the tools of the craft, they also lost a large trove of meticulous artistic processes, built with each successive maker. Would a painter be able to make the same work without oils and canvas?.

‘India on film’ investigates the relationship between the art and craft of making on ‘film’ through a series of film screenings, workshops and installations. The intent is to highlight the shift caused by the dismemberment of a medium through changes in narrative techniques by celebrating experiments on film from the Indian subcontinent. The curatorial spreads its net wide and takes you through Films Division documentaries, narratives from art history and contemporary works from a multitude of conscious filmmakers working in the Indian context. India on film celebrates Indian experiments on film, giving centerstage to a medium, still very much alive in the world. It seeks to highlight the deliberation in the ‘making’ of moving images. It seeks to intervene in the historical narratives in film studies and to bring the medium back in focus.

This programme acknowledges the work of the many artists and researchers who have consistently contributed to the discourse – the work of Experimenta India, Amrit Gangar, Films Division of India, the many independent film clubs across India and all the proponents of Cinema of Prayoga who have informed and guided us in presenting ‘India on Film’.

‘India on film’ has been curated by Harkat Studios, an international boutique arts studio based in Mumbai and Berlin. 

Head over to http://harkat.in/16mm/serendipity-2019/ for complete details.