Translucent Video Art Festival is an initiative by Chameleon Art Projects with its focus on experimental video / cinema. This festival aims at building a platform for video art in India, encouraging the practice and building a deeper and uncompromised understanding for it, especially for the emerging artists of the country.
For its launch in Mumbai, Translucent partners with What About Art?, which is opening the first art space in Mumbai focusing on Video Art and moving image. WAA? also gathers an arts management agency, and an international artists residency in its new premise in Bandra.
This is the preview of its first edition which is in Goa beginning in December 2013 until February 2014, where it takes the form of an expanded event, screening over 45 videos / films by artists like Anita Dube, Pushpamala N., Tejal Shah, Rafeeq Ellias, Tushar Joag, Sharmila Samant, Kirah Subbaiah, Shilpa Gupta, etc.
This is in conjunction to the exhibition, “Rebirth of Detail” curated by Kanchi Mehta at Sunaparanta Goa Centre for Arts, Panjim.
Video art was recognized as a form of artistic expression the late 1960s and early 1970s as new technology became more accessible outside corporate broadcasting. An important distinction between video art and theatrical cinema is that video art does not depend on most conventional norms and boundaries that define theatrical cinema. Video art may not employ the use of actors, may contain no dialogue, and may have no discernible narrative or plot. The intentions of video or experimental filmmaking explore the boundaries of the medium itself, as well as the artistic expression. However, one of the few characteristics of Video art has been to attack the viewer’s expectations, which have been brutally shaped by conventional and commercial cinema.
Many of the early prominent international video artists were those involved with concurrent movements in conceptual art, performance, and experimental film, such as Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, Wolf Kahlen, Totten Chase etc. However, we have some brilliant video artists from India, who have indulged in experimental film making and have been exceptional, starting from Tyeb Mehta, Sukhdev, Pramod Pati, Vijay B. Chandra, etc.
The digital video "revolution" of the 1990s has given wide access to sophisticated editing and control technology, allowing many artists to work with video and to create interactive installations based on video. Experimenting with new media, the Internet, graphic design, animation and stop motion are a few techniques of video art.
TRANSLUCENT brings to you over 40 videos and films by some of the most influential and promising as well as emerging artists and filmmakers from India. Many of these films have been screened in galleries, institutions as well as important film festivals across the world and have been instrumental in changing the face of filmmaking in the country.
*image (left)
Aaditi Joshi,
‘Suffocation’, 2008,
single channel video, 47-second loop, colour, sound (video still).
Image courtesy Gallery Maskara.
