:: Sunday, January 04, 2004 ::

This week Net Art Review features "Geographical Architectures in Contemporary Indian Video Art" by Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet, presented for our readers in collaboration with its author. (December 2003 © R. Ferrera-Balanquet. All right reserved.)

EXCERPT: The window opens and closes. The sound of the train fades into the sound of running water and the title “Pure” remains static for a few seconds. In Sudda Gupta’s piece, a naked man takes a shower in a very small bathroom. The performative nature of the act recalls the architecture of the process: a daily act becomes a performance and the body, the center of representation. The sensation of the long take hooks me on the present. Clean vs. Dirt unfolds as a dichotomy until I realized that a mechanism of regression takes places in the lower side of the frame. Technology is brought to question the process of mixing temporal spaces…

[Click here to read entire essay.]

Ferrera-Balanquet reviews an exhibition of contemporary Indian video art at the museum in Merida, Mexico, with poignancy and nostalgia for a past that is strangely familiar, yet, not his own. The artists in their in video selections, however, are less conscious of a relative distance from the here-and-now and represent an India that is sincere, dimensional, and very contemporary.

Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet, MFA is an artist, writer and curator.
http://www.cartodigital.org/krosrods

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