Performative Lectures and Discussion

with Jesal Kapadia & Brian McCarthy, Naeem Mohaiemen, and Shaina Anand

Saturday April 19, 2PM

Join us for performative lectures by Jesal Kapadia & Brian McCarthy and Naeem Mohaiemen and a discussion with the artists and Shaina Anand.

This event will explore both the pad.ma archive and the artists' interventions on it. This event accompanies the exhibition Working In and Out of the Archive, co-presented with The Images Festival.

http://gallerytpw.ca/rd/working-in-and-out-of-the-archive/

Working In and Out of the Archive an exhibition presenting the results of commissioned explorations of the Pad.ma online archive, with contributions by Reena Katz, Jesal Kapadia & Brian McCarthy and Naeem Mohaiemen, in consultation and collaboration with Pad.ma representatives Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran.

Pad.ma short for Public Access Digital Media Archive is an online platform that aims to reimagine the shape, form and function of an archive. It consists primarily of footage, not completed films, and its focus is not only collecting images but enhancing those materials with an array of textual annotation and unique visualization possibilities. Focused on material from India, Pad.ma contains more than 1,200 hours of footage, all of which is searchable, viewable and free to use for non-commercial applications.

As a means of exploration looking at its contents, structures, and possibilities Gallery TPW, Pad.ma and Images Festival invited a group of artists to respond to the archive. Naeem Mohaiemen is digitizing an unedited collection of 40 Hi-8 tape interviews he shot in Bangladesh in 19931994 a project that had been abandoned in the face of a personal reckoning about the good war. Reena Katz will present a series of audio performances centred on dialogue from the 1983 film Razia Sultan. Working through keywords, videos, annotations, still images and audio files, Jesal Kapadia and Brian McCarthy will evoke a possible imaginary of counter-or alter-development: what radical perception of the preconditions of capitalist development do activist media make possible? Their reassembly of the archive will provide a model for a revisualization of inhabitation, territory, memory, and collectivity within the context of contemporary land and housing contestations in India. The artists inquiries into Pad.ma will manifest in online edits, performance gestures, and guided tours of specific material in the archive, viewable online at the gallery.

These inquiries into Pad.ma will manifest in online edits, guided tours of specific material in the archive and new texts viewable online at the gallery for the duration of the festival as well as a discursive event pairing a conversation about the project with performances and talks by some of the artists.