Against the Grain: In Conversation with Bharati Kapadia, Anuj Daga and Chandita Mukherjee

Recorded on 22 December 2021.

In this episode of ASAP Cast, we continue our discussion with Bharati Kapadia, Anuj Daga and Chandita Mukherjee―the curators of the second edition of the Video Art by Indian Contemporary Artists (VAICA) Festival, Fields of Vision, that ran online from 20 November to 18 December 2021. In this episode, they talk about how the festival―in its diverse showcase of experimental films―has enabled the growth of new forms of intimacy through the healing collapse of geographies in such a precarious condition as the pandemic. The curators address the multifarious vocabularies through which artists are navigating changes in the technological apparatus, thus, creating new channels of cognition for the viewing eye. They address questions around shifts in registers of attention and intimacy with these emergent languages, especially in light of the brevity of addictive algorithms that have moulded how long or deeply one engages with the image.

We conclude by talking about the possibilities of video curation in a post-pandemic landscape, and the need for a renewed vernacular to counter mechanisms of control. Will there be new registers of friction between the image and the body? Further, what role does the artist play in producing and/or preserving the politics of the image in separation from market forces? As the curators point out, the festival was hosted in a heightened moment of digital currency and NFTs―that is, when images were being increasingly subsumed into the language of data capitalism. The fabrication of subjectivity from data resists the threat of finitude in the promise of a virtual anchor and attendant assets. As the festival works against the grain of this system (where images acquire value through semiotic capital) towards a cultural autonomy and transformative impulse, we discuss how the moving image may interact with emerging digital infrastructures and economies of contemporary art, reconfiguring spectatorship and its own critical potential.

^{(Featured Image: Still from Cleansing. Vibha Galhotra. 2016. Image courtesy of the artist and VAICA.)} 

In case you missed the first part of this conversation, you may listen to it here.

To read more about the works featured as part of VAICA’s Fields of Vision, please click here, here, here, here and here.