RECORD OF THE CHANGING WORLD

Video art and its emerging issues: Anuj Daga visits the VAICA festival.

- Anuj Daga

Even though the moving image format has been frequently used by contemporary visual artists, one does not find many public archives or exhibitions planned around video art in India. The VAICA (Video Art by Indian Contemporary Artists) festival fills this void and hopes to make video works accessible to anyone interested in looking at experiments within the medium.

Artist Bharati Kapadia and documentary filmmaker Chandita Mukherjee have brought together 67 video works by 35 contemporary artists practising in different idioms across India. Distributed over five Saturdays of November and screened across different cultural venues in Mumbai, the event opens up multiple commentaries with curators, artists, students and other curious minds. VAICA is also mounted at Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in December.

While films – short or long – may follow a linear narrative logic or give in to messaging, video art often explores formal and imaginative abstractions. In redefining the reception of the image, music and text, video art nuances and broadens the interpretative dimension of the medium as well as the message, beyond the realm of entertainment.

While independent tools for video recording became available across the world only by the late 1960s, in India, they were available outside state-owned broadcasting institutions only from the 1980s. This was when portable video recording equipment could be privately imported into the country, which explains the growth of video art in India primarily after the phase of liberalization. In tracing the history of video art in India in the VAICA festival catalogue, Mukherjee explains that “[t]he first significant video art that one can remember was in 1993 by Vivan Sundaram as part of the Memorial