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March 22-23, 2005 at Apeejay Media Gallery, New Delhi.
Featuring Ashok Sukumaran (media artist and architect, Los Angeles/ Mumbai),
Shaina Anand (filmmaker, Mumbai), Mukul Patel (sound artist, London) |
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BOMBAY,
BADARPUR BORDER is a suite of installations created for exhibition at
the Apeejay Media Gallery, Badarpur Border, New Delhi. The works use a
variety of analog and digital media, including live electronics, to circulate
a theme (Bombay), as well as a physical location (Badarpur), through the
gallery space.
The gallery/border is presented by the artists as a site from which to
consider the Other city - Bombay; not only the material city (which is
now anyway called Mumbai), but also the diffuse data traces, mythical
and desirous constructions that form its virtual and media identities.
The artists deny the customary claims to authenticity that accompany,
for example, the Tate's Century City or NDTV's Mumbai Live. Only one of
us is actually from Mumbai, and we have almost nothing from Mumbai to
show. We gather here to invent and perform "Bombay", to synthesize
it in various media: a building as text, an interactive movie generated
from images trawled from the net, a virtual user-controlled sea, a piece
of film, a live studio. Other actions take place beyond the gallery bounds,
stretching across two groups that would perhaps never meet: visitors to
the gallery, and those outside, who view the gallery itself as a technocultural
object.
The artists' attempt to reconsider traditional notions of site-specific
art (and in turn, question ideas of location and mobility) in the context
of media arts practice. Here, we are not really mobile - we are just in
the "wrong" place. The map is cracked, and we have fallen through.
Like GPS gone awry, or a recurring wrong number on your phone. Where is
the audience? What kind of Bombay is this? Where on earth is Badarpur?
By coming here, we hope to find the many unacknowledged and unexplored
ways in which our bodies intersect with place, and imagined place.
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