4 marzo - 4 julio 2022
Bait Al Serkal, Sharjah
Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF)
Ubicación, contacto

Curadora: Hoor Al Qasimi

Acerca de CAMP

Passages through Passages brings together a body of key works by CAMP, the Mumbai-based artist studio founded in 2007 by Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran. In this exhibition, the artists offer a spatial and cultural imagination, cultivated through their work on the history and possibility of technology as an embedded, geopolitical medium.

Presenting a cross-section of works created between 2006 and 2020, these projects encompass video and audio works, archives, interventions and collections, and draw upon the collective’s unique artistic and research methods. Through them, CAMP discuss topics such as anxieties and inoculations about ‘public health’ under surveillance, the longue-duree of technological methods and expectations, movement as transport but also as a different process of finding unexpected ways forward, like the surprise of the cut in film.

A Passage through Passages (2020), which lends its name to the title of the exhibition, is a video project that travels ‘impossibly’ on new or recently rebuilt roads across Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and India. It presents endoscopic views of the interiors of road systems and its network geography that represents pride, money, energy and climate risk as well as travel for work, longing and separation, regional politics and its vulnerabilities.

Other works that deploy movement in their own revelatory ways include exhibitions themselves, such as the photos-of-photos of The Annotated ‘Gujarat and the Sea’ Exhibition (2011), cutout images from a newspaper archive that have found each other in A Photogenetic Line (2017), an assemblage of leaked phone call rhetoric and persuasion in The Radia Tap(e)s (2012), and the neighbour as a political category in Al jaar qabla al daar (The neighbour before the house) (2009–2011), a film made from a series of video probes into the landscape of East Jerusalem.

The exhibition also features From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf (2009–2013), a film project commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation Production Programme for Sharjah Biennial 11. This travelogue across three gulfs emerged from CAMP’s interest in the maritime world connected to Sharjah and follows the physical crossings made by groups of people who travel a world of intimacies not easily bridged by nostalgics or nationalists. From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf followed CAMP’s experiences on two other Sharjah-based projects on view in this exhibition—the book Wharfage and Radio Meena, recipients of the grand jury prize at Sharjah Biennial 9.

CAMP: Passages through Passages is curated by Sharjah Art Foundation Director Hoor Al Qasimi.