11: Shambhavi Kaul

31 March, 2018 - 17:00
Sphinx cinema

A survey of Shambhavi Kaul’s work over the past decade, moving backwards from her most recent film Hijacked to her early investigations into the Indian landscape and its representation in works such as Scene 32 and 21 Chitrakoot. This program also includes some of Kaul’s recent gallery-based work as well as a reading by the artist. As Andréa Picard has written, a “strange yet familiar sense of place” dominates Shambhavi Kaul’s work. Her cinematic constructions conjure uncanny, science-fictive non-places. Whether working with found footage or with her own images, Kaul’s work looks at the cinematic construction of place, and inevitably with it, that of identity. Shambhavi Kaul: “If earlier conceptions of cinema presupposed the movie theatre’s discrete experience, in a world where images surround us, I see my work as acts of re-circulation that may unearth genealogies of appropriation by the camera and by cinema”. Shambhavi Kaul was born in Jodhpur, India, and lives and works in Durham, North Carolina, USA.

 

In the presence of Shambhavi Kaul.

Hijacked

Shambhavi Kaul
,
US, IN
,
2017
,
HD
,
colour
,
15'

Airplane space is inhabited by characters for whom ‘escape’, one of the promises of airplane technology, proves elusive.

Night Noon

Shambhavi Kaul
,
US, IN
,
2014
,
HD
,
colour
,
11'

Amidst desert landscapes and splendid ocean views, a dog and a parrot appear. They emphasise the cosmic rhythm of day and night. Departing from Zabriskie Point, the film surreptitiously crosses over into Mexico, its creative geography never far from our cinematic memory.

Mount Song

Shambhavi Kaul
,
US, IN
,
2013
,
HD
,
colour
,
9'

A current runs underneath. It creeps under the door, makes its way into the cracks, revealing, obfuscating or breaking as clouds in the sky. Mountain, cave, river, forest and trap door; martial gestures, reiterated, stripped and rendered. A storm blows through. Here, the surfaces of set-constructions are offered for our attachments.

21 Chitrakoot

Shambhavi Kaul
,
US, IN
,
2012
,
HD
,
colour
,
9'

A land, as ancient and ideal as nature, is called up through the chroma-key backdrops of one of the world’s most viewed mythological television series. Spectacular images spring forth from a glorious, more magical time. But, as nostalgia turns into melancholia, hostility is the inevitable result. There is no option but a war to destroy everything, after which trace impulses towards a narrative are the last surviving markers of the material past.

Scene 32

Shambhavi Kaul
,
US, IN
,
2009
,
HD
,
colour
,
6'

The salt fields of Central Kutch are examined through high definition video and hand processed 16mm film to become another thing altogether: neither a specific location in India nor its representation but a rebuilt world of precipices and gullies, untouchable textures and unfathomable scale.

Fallen Objects

Shambhavi Kaul
,
US, IN
,
2015
,
colour

A video loop composed of seven shots that continuously rearrange themselves based on an internal code, and floorbound sculptures in the form of scraps of cloth – the “fallen objects” of the title. Stripping away the narrative potential of its genre cinema-derived source material, Fallen Objects considers cinematic space outside the cinema and imagines humans inside it. Fallen Objects is an installation that Shambhavi Kaul presented at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015.

 

video loop (excerpt)

In flight

Shambhavi Kaul
,
US, IN
,
2017

Shambhavi Kaul will read from her 40-page booklet In flight produced for a show at Jhaveri Contemporary (Mumbai) in 2017 to accompany her film Hijacked. In flight is a collection of images and texts collected by the artist from in-flight magazines. Shambhavi Kaul: “If you start reading these magazines and pay attention to what is actually being said, it can reveal some of the more problematic aspects of travel. Some of the sentences are really surprising and may even contradict what is supposedly being conveyed. The images and texts are bits and pieces that I thought expressed this.”

Safe travels

Shambhavi Kaul
,
UK, IN
,
2017

Two-channel video installation presented with Hijacked and In flight at Jhaveri Contemporary in 2017. A hyperrealist aerial view of a tropical island is seen through the gap between billowing curtains. Played in a seamless loop, this hypnotic work cleverly invokes various airplane presences – from dividing curtains and multiple screens to the distanced view of our planet from an airplane window.

 

video loop