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  -  Propositions: Expanded Practices (2021-2022)

Propositions: Expanded Practices 

Propositions: Expanded Practices is the second set of a long-term series of educational programming by Ark and Reliable Copy where creative practitioners present their ongoing or existing enquiries in the form of intensive and experimental workshops. Functioning as an opening out of one’s practice (and along with it their research methodologies, working materials, and conceptual methods), the programmes facilitate dialogue and critique through involved and participatory models. Existing across different durations, with or without defined outcomes, and through regular collaborations, Propositions attempts to chart alternative curriculums, frameworks, and infrastructures for developing arts education and practice. Propositions is made possible and supported by the Rubamin Foundation.


OPEN CALL

#3 For All Vahanvatti with CAMP

19th, 20th, 24th, 25th, 26th and 27th March, 2022

OPEN CALL: 13th February, 2022

Deadline for Application: 6th March, 2022

Ark and Reliable Copy are proud to announce an open call for applications from students and recent graduates, writers, artists, media and culture theorists, thinkers, designers, and anyone interested in the below topic and its related context, to participate in a workshop led by CAMP as part of our Propositions programme.

CAMP is a collaborative studio founded in 2007, producing work in film and video, electronic media and public art forms, in a practice characterised by a hand-dirtying, non-alienated relation to technology. CAMP’s projects have found ways to engage intimately with energy, communication, transport, and surveillance systems, roads, ships, archives, neighbourhoods – things much larger than itself. From their home base in Mumbai, they run a long-lived rooftop screening space, co-host the online platforms pad.ma (est. 2008) and indiancine.ma (est. 2013), and related projects such as njp.ma and phantas.ma. They are recipients of the 2020 Nam June Paik Art Center Prize.

Module Description:

This module is designed to help a group think from the sea, rather than from the land.

Land-based, urban-rural, property-oriented and nationally bounded concepts and instincts, can limit our thinking and doing. Here, we explore over-the-horizon forms of life, energy and ecosystems that are world-scale, but have something to do with us, and also have their own intricate local atmospheres. The sea here is a virtuality, a force-field that has been in dense exchanges with landed geography for a very long time.

Our sea will be a specific one — the one touching Mumbai, Mangalore, Alang, Mundra, Galle, Basra, Bushehr, Dubai, Djibouti, Eyl, Pemba and Mozambique, among a thousand other places and non-places. Parts of it have been called The Indian Ocean, and its residents have many fascinating trajectories beyond Amitav Ghosh books, such as those of chanchiya or muwalladin. The most referenced “explorers” of this sea remain colonial or neo-colonial ones. But we are at a point in historical time where new kinds of explorations have become possible, for different reasons than before, and where new and old subjects and objects are speaking, interacting and producing new things.

The format of this module will be to examine this potential of new things, via an in-depth encounter with recent works and projects by artists, thinkers, and new explorers. We will do this slowly and in detail, usually looking at a single work or project/idea per day, and then we will invite the group to
produce their own responses through the duration, i.e. to overwrite, rework, or challenge the originals.

We use the sea as a medium through which we can connect our everyday concerns to a cloud of something larger and lesser known, that is no longer simply a “natural world”. Like in the double-edged joy and anxiety of the Mumbai monsoon, or recalling the strange, paradoxical intimacy with
humanity generated by the first pictures of Earth from space.

Image: 1824 Admiralty map of the Mozambique channel overwritten by two different sailing hands from Kutch, probably late 1800s. Vahanvati in Kutchi means sailor.

Eligibility and Terms

  • The program is free for all selected participants to attend, and is open to students, recent graduates, writers, artists, media or culture theorists, thinkers, designers, and anyone interested in the topic and its related context. However, the applicant must hold a Bachelor’s degree (in any field).
  • A maximum of 10 participants will be selected for this module. The participant’s attendance for the entire duration of the module is mandatory.
  • Applicants must be based in India.
  • The workshop will take place online through a shared Zoom portal and other online tools.
  • The workshop will be intensive and will consist of discussions, readings, lectures,
    exercises, and screenings. Participants are requested to make sure that they are free from
    any other commitments for the duration of the workshop.
  • Participants will have access to a reading list and set of resources prior to the workshop. They are expected to read and go through the resource list before each session and actively participate in discussions, use collective thinking, and generate creative reflections through their own practice.

Application Procedure

Please send your applications to propositions.info@gmail.com with the Subject Line as ‘Application for ForAllVahanvatti_Name of Applicant’.

Please note that incomplete applications and/or applications submitted to any other Gallery Ark or Reliable Copy email ID will not be considered valid.

If you have any questions, please contact propositions.info@gmail.com.

Applications for For All Vahanvatti must include:

  1. A personal bio of about 200 words introducing yourself to us. Do include your educational background. No accomplishments or qualifications are important, but rather express your concerns and interests.
  2. A sample of your practice — in any form — that would help us in understanding your interests in relation to this module. Writing samples, and brief descriptions of research or curatorial projects can be submitted, if relevant.
  3. A statement of intent, answering the following questions:
  • What about travel or geography is interesting to you? Does it change your work?
  • What would you say is the milieu or context in which your practice unfolds, in terms of ideas (where do they come from?) and whom it reaches (audiences/users/readers?)
  • Do you have any personal connections to: maritime world, ecology, science, tourism, or any places along the coast? Please tell us about it.

Responses will be accepted in writing (a maximum of 500 words) or as an audio file (maximum 5 minutes). The language for the audio can be English or Hindi.

All of the above must be sent as either a single PDF or a single WeTransfer link, with the title ForAllVahanvatti Application_Name of Applicant.

Participants are selected through an open call. Candidates are considered on the basis of their submitted documents and statement of intent, outlining why they are interested in this module, and how it relates to their practice and research.

The selection process will be done by CAMP, along with representatives from the Gallery Ark and Reliable Copy teams.


#2 The Observer with Deepak ഉണ്ണികൃഷ്ണന്‍

4th, 5th, 11th, 12th, 18th, and 19th February, 2022

Online

Applications Closed

Dear Stranger: 

1] Secrets. Is it possible to have them in the age of street cams, search engines, and smart tech? 

2] Consequences. What happens to the creative practitioner in hyper-surveilled environments? 

3]  Invention/Convention. How does censorship and/or self-censorship affect either in monitored spaces? 

4] Finally, Fear. Throughout history, across disciplines, how have artists negotiated their fears? 

This is a module that will use these four questions as starting points to have conversations about thinking up, making, and perhaps even discarding work. We will read, listen to, watch, and speak as a collective, to practices that have grappled with variations of these questions with care, vision, and verve. And as we speak together, we will make and share work about the lives of others, and perhaps ourselves, which may hit these registers that we are concerned about.

Signed,

The Observer

Deepak ഉണ്ണികൃഷ്ണന്‍ is a writer from Abu Dhabi. His book ‘Temporary People’, a work of fiction about Gulf narratives steeped in Malayalee and South Asian lingo, won the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, the Hindu Prize, and the Moore Prize.


#1 OnScreens with Charu Maithani

12th-18th December 2021

Online

Applications Closed

OnScreens aims to situate screens in contemporary visual practice and culture by analysing their various functions and capacities. There are several ways in which we encounter screens in our daily lives, such as interactive screens of mobile phones, moving-image projections, and monitor displays, with any surface having the potential to become a screen if light is projected upon it. Screens are not just the means to partake in social, economic, and cultural activities – they also re-establish and blur spatial and temporal boundaries. Though the relationship of, and with, screens extends to various areas of contemporary life, it is in media art practices that we see screens doing something other than display, communicate, and interact. 

OnScreens will trace the history of screens in pre-cinema and present media devices to mainly pay close attention to the operations of screens in the contemporary human-machine arrangement that they are a part of. The workings of screens in this context will be examined in relation to other elements that accompany them including images, light, and frames. With deliberations on various diverse theoretical frameworks and creative practices, OnScreens will attempt to articulate different understandings of screens and their becomings.

Charu Maithani is a researcher who organises her inquiries in the form of writing and curated projects. Her focus lies at the intersection of technology, art, cinema, and media studies, with a specific interest in the technocultural space that screens occupy in the contemporary postmedia space. She has recently completed her PhD from UNSW, Sydney and runs the online platform PROPRIOCEPTION.