4: Other Times, Other Species: New Video Art from India

This presentation returns to a co-curated project that I had collaborated on with video and performance artist, Anuj Vaidya, ‘Other Species, Other Times: New Video Art from India’ that was inaugurated at the Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA) in 2015. Our joint interest in film programming had us keenly understand that what we were launching was a reversal of exhibition practices by lining up single channel video art and installations in a repertory film space. Through our curatorial intervention we had made film out of video art works that were originally intended to be in a black box or white cube of the gallery. Additionally, of particular interest to me was the idea of projection in a theatrical space that produced the impression of watching one long work, credits were at the very end of the show. The artists were aware of our intervention and enthusiastic about the different renditions of duration that this show presented. In my return to the show with a focus on particular works, I want to reanimate the diagram of the video art installation so as to consider the pressure of the loop on duration, the viewer’s absorption of a multi-channel video work, and relationship between digital projection and acoustic chamber. These lines of inquiry obviously reorder and scramble our careful line-up of works along different pathways, ones that are provoked by writing and recall the original divagation I experienced with these works in the gallery.