CHITRA KARKHANA (Art Goes Heiligendamm)
Shaina Anand calls herself Chitra Karkhana when she makes her video art.
She sits in a moss-coloured armchair, and we sit before her. We listen to her thoughts as her her splitscreen videopieces project onto a large screen behind her.
The concept of Chitra Karkhana, she tells us, is to critique image representation. Her statements barricade themselves within verbal butresses - these ample and ambigous words artists use to validate an art born from concept, an art often only beautiful once that concept has been revealed. She talks of confrontations, assumptions, interventions and disseminations. She says she is an artist of microcosms, creating closed spaces in which her videos are shot and broadcast. She displays the mechanisms of global media, she claims, in order to poke holes through them, to create porosities and leakage across boundaries.
Charged with hopeful abstractions - so is her language; her videos, however, are enchanting. Their concept is simple, the results spontaneous and touching - testaments to the world in which they were born. It is a world populated by lively Bombay and Dehli residents, intrigued by the camera watching them, eager to share.The main motif is the quad-screen, by means of which simultaneous broadcasts of different individuals interact. The first example Chitra Karkhana shows us uses CCT surveillance technology and cable TV to bring together groups of children in different shops of a Bombay neighborhood. Television sets, a microphone, and a CCT camera are placed on the counters of these four shops. Children and teenagers flock around the monitors, both to see themselves and to communicate with the other faces that share the screen. "Hey yellow shirt!" the boy in the bottom right says to the one in the top left, "Look towards the camera." The communication is instantaneous, honest, delightful. Within moments, the children have begun a taking turns singing popular songs, rating eachother, competing through the miles of cable that have been wound throughout the neighborhood.
The other pieces, although of the same esthetic, use Digital Video and achieve varied results - they unite four housewives in Nepal, the workers in four basement factories in Delhi, and various spontaneous interactions between men children, workers, doctors and actors. The subjects, though in their familiar home or work environments, are all unknowingly within 200 meters from one another. Though living in the same tiny radius of the big cities, they are all interacting for the first time.
Chitra Karkhana's pieces are provocative, but not necessarily in the way she intends them to be. Instead of commenting on the limitations and manipulations of mass media, I feel they instead channel a certain anthropological awareness. Tensions between different castes, between a physician offering free answers to the public's questions, between a woman waxing her legs before three housewives, make small scale statements about today's India - its outward reach for a new identity, and its simultaneously firm grasp on tradition. A provoking example of how art, once release from its butresses, projected into a space upon which the artist then relinquishes her control, can achieve unforeseen impacts, moments alltogether great in their smallness.
Please spend some time on the Chitra Karkhana website, where many of her videos, in full length, can be viewed: http://www.chitrakarkhana.net
