#FaunaOfMirrors: Labyrinths

By Armin Linke (ITA)

Artist and filmmaker, Armin Linke is internationally renowned for his photographs and expansive archive, in which he documents the rapid changes occurring at the earth’s surface both photographically and in moving images. The pictures collected in Linke’s archive constitute a resource for developing an understanding of the human impact on planet earth - from seabed to rainforests to agrarian territories. 

By Arun Vijai Mathavan (IND)

What we do with our dead, how we regard them, is dependent on the specific conditions into which we are born—belief, religion, language, place, sect, caste, gender and, in recent times, science. In India, those classified as ‘untouchables’ or ‘Dalits’ have been forced to handle the dead for centuries. 

In almost all hospitals in India, a range of tasks, sometimes even the opening of the torso with the Y-incision, is done by semi-literate, low-level staff. They often belong to the Dalit communities. The manner in which they are compelled to do this in modern, state-run hospitals has gone unnoticed and undocumented. Millennia of Oppression proposes to shine a light on an unknown, shrouded world. Read more 

By CAMP (IND)

CAMP's installation is a 100-foot long branching sequence of images produced from The Hindu Photo Archives. These cutouts are a way of reframing and rebirthing existing photographs, as new organisms. Not to remove their background environment, nor to frame a heroic figure as in the traditional political cutout, but instead to create a new boundary or border for the image. A border that leads us to the next image.

The sequence evolves by following one or more of these rules: a) people grow older, or younger; b) things in the background come into the foreground, or vice versa; and, c) two photo captions refer to each other. 

In this way, we traverse a series of perceptual (shape), historical (time) and geographic (political) borders. Here, like in cinema, the cut is not a brick wall but an invitation: for increased traffic at any border.   Read more

By Desire Machine Collective (IND)

Residue is an experimental film, a stroll through a dream world incorporating both the universe of the mechanical, human, and natural as when a machine morphs into a butterfly, or power meters indicate depleted figures. 

With their film, Desire Machine Collective hopes once again to construct raw symbols and images. Evoking the idea of “perception image,” the artists try to articulate the known cycle of the creation and destruction of memory. Read more

By Naeem Mohaiemen (BGD)

Naeem Mohaiemen combines films, installations, and essays to research Bangladesh histories. A photograph circulates, showing five men staring out of a window. Actually, only four look out; the last man breaks protocol and looks at the camera. The light has a soft glow. The stage is a bombed building. All five men wear military fatigues; the color must have been olive green. 

Snapped by Magnum photographer Chris Steele-Perkins in war-torn Beirut of 1982, the image is a teasing enigma. Arabic newspapers claim it as evidence of Bangladeshi fighters in the PLO (Fatah faction). But go a little deeper into the memory hole and sediments darken the third world international. London yields an indifferent response, Beirut has men scared of the today and the dreaded security protocol.

Talking about yesterday’s wars seems a luxury; requested by the visitor, unreciprocated by the precarious resident– still a ‘guest worker’ after twenty years. 

Abu Ammar was the code name of Yasser Arafat. His Fatah faction of PLO fascinated Bangladesh JSD (National Socialist Party) leader Major Jalil, despite the clearer Marxist tendencies of the George Habash faction. Still, the light was beautiful. Read more

By Rashid Rana (PAK)

Red Carpet II masquerades as a Persian carpet. For those bound to dismiss it as obvious imagery for a Pakistani artist, Rashid has the last laugh on them.

By Sheba Chhachhi & Sonia Jabbar (IND) 

Intervening in media representations of armed conflict, dominated by groups of men with guns, this installation invites the viewer to enter the private spaces of war, to hear voices normally drowned out by the clamour of contesting stereotypes— the voices of ordinary women of Kashmir. 

Humble materials— earth, bricks and rice evoke the domestic, within a configuration that draws on the contemplative formalism of the Mughal gardens in Kashmir. 

Somewhat subversively, rusted iron ‘books’ are placed within a series of rihals, book holders, traditionally used for the holy books of Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism. Each book is placed on a low platform, eliciting intimate contact with a B&W photograph and a testimony. 

These testimonies, gathered over a period of six years, 1995 onwards, break out of the homogenizing, highly polarized representation of ‘Muslims’ versus ‘Hindus’, ‘Indians’ versus ‘Pakistanis’, ‘us’ versus ‘them’. Women from a wide range of communities and subject positions bear.