‘Being Singular Plural: Moving Images from India’

A unique event at Berlin based Deutsche Guggenheim, entitled ‘Being Singular Plural: Moving Images from India’ collates film and video works by some of the innovative media practitioners. Shumona Goel and Shai Heredia, Sonal Jain & Mriganka Madhukaillya of Desire Machine Collective, Amar Kanwar, and Kabir Mohanty have a background in cinema.

Most of them continue to screen their films in international festivals. They employ film and video to formulate complex aesthetic, technological, and sociopolitical statements that question the often-bombastic cinematic strategies, methods, forms, and subjects of the global media industry.

'Being Singular Plural' celebrates and explores the unobtrusive and the unseen. Jean-Luc Nancy's idea from his book of the same name, first published in 1996, in which the individual is always understood within a social framework, gives the structural scaffolding for the exhibition. Elaborating on its purpose, a curatorial note by Sandhini Poddar elaborates: “The films' and videos' images do not serve as windows to the world, nor point to any transcendental truths, but are presented as they are,
distinguished by their evidence.

"As the author has argued, the emptying out of representation, wherein evidence lies, points to the moving image as an end in itself rather than a means to an end that may lie outside the image's surface. This embodiment of truth, as it resides within the very structure and materiality of the moving image, overturns previous expectations of how it communicates - it seeks to bridge worlds through affect and sensation."

Recognizing the complex character of 'first person plural' and the interconnectedness of all beings, the selected films and videos invite the viewer to study, reassess, and challenge conventional categories such as fact and fiction, art and cinema, and objectivity and subjectivity, thereby instigating new kinds of viewership.

This is one among the several ongoing international shows of contemporary art from India that are contextualized in backdrop of the country’s new economic challenges, social complexities and personal challenges at an individual level apart from tracing
its enchanting visual trajectory.