‘Moving Images from India’ in Berlin

Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin presents ‘Being Singular Plural: Moving Images from India’, a new show that brings together film and video works by today’s media practitioners. While recent international shows of contemporary art from India have displayed finished works as end products, to contextualize them in light of the country’s fast-growing economic, the works here tend to reveal the quieter principles of perception, practice, and process even while exploring the individual nature of life and the moving image.

The exhibition is oriented toward co-producing work, facilitating research, and assembling a unified community of practitioners. Elaborating on its purpose, a curatorial note states:

“ Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of 'being singular plural' imparts it the structural framework. Recognizing the interconnectedness of all beings, the selected films and videos invite the viewer to reassess conventional boundaries between such categories as fact and fiction, art and cinema, and objectivity and subjectivity. By manipulating sound, image, and text in experimental ways, the artists shift viewers’ positions from those of passive spectatorship to ones of active participation—to places where the ‘we’ of ‘being together’ is in the immediate here and now.”

The emptying out of representation that is the resting place of evidence alludes to the moving image as an end in itself than merely as a means to an end outside of the image’s surface. This embodiment of truth that resides in the its very structure and materiality overturns expectations of how the image engages with the world.

The film as well as video installations presented in the show try to stimulate a new kind of viewer base. Their images neither act as windows to the world outside nor underline any transcendental truths; they are presented ‘as they are’, largely distinguished by their evidence.