The Inspiring Hacktivist Ethos of an Indian Art Studio
At MoMA, these conversations loop on three monitors, and on the wall behind them, a line diagram illustrates how it works. The technology is simple, physical: coaxial cables snaking in and out of homes, linking neighbors who lived and worked in close proximity without ever encountering one another. In one of the episodes, a leatherworker asks a tailor where he is located. “Right in front of you!” the man replies. He is in the basement of a tall building just across the street, hidden away from the eyes of his neighbors during his 12-hour workdays. “Khirkeeyaan” was undertaken at a time when CCTV cameras and satellite TV were just becoming common in India, on the heels of the economic liberalization that had taken off in the late 1990s. They were, along with Western brands and special economic zones (not to mention NGOs), signs of a new era of communication, connection, and efficiency. But at the same time, in cities like New Delhi, gentrification intensified, surveillance became omnipresent, and the commons were whittled away.
By transforming technologies built for one-way consumption—the CCTV consumes; the TV is consumed—into a communicative medium, “Khirkeeyaan” fashioned makeshift public squares. In the videos, women trade tips on handling alcoholic husbands and reflect on being migrants in Delhi; men exchange jokes, poems, and ideas for collective action against development projects; workers sing for one another while toiling with their hands. A sense of shared conditions emerges—I’m tempted to say organically, but that is the kind of uncritical documentary-speak that is anathema to CAMP. Unlike nonfiction artists who fetishize the camera’s ability to capture a self-evident reality, Anand recognizes that to make images is to reorient social relations: In one of the episodes, she even inserted an actor to steer the conversation after the interactions between a shopkeeper and some workers turned casteist.
Orientation is key to another project on view, which explores two very durable mediums of global communication: airwaves and oceans. Both conjure visions of infinite freedom but are tightly regulated, depending on where you’re coming from and where you’re going. Back in 2009, CAMP created a publication, Wharfage, which inventoried the myriad items ferried by wooden boats, or dhows, from the Gulf of Kutch in India to Iran and Somalia, via free or cheap ports in Sharjah and Dubai, traversing routes that more official traders were unable to travel then, whether due to geopolitical sanctions or fears of piracy. A complementary radio station allowed sailors at the various ports to communicate—share songs, stories—and visitors to tune in. That project gave rise to From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, an 83-minute film stitched together from playful, low-res videos shot by the seafarers on their cell phones and often set to Bollywood music, forming an intimate and impish portrait of labor and leisure in a borderless realm.
