A Formal Film in Nine Episodes, Prologue & Epilogue

Mumbai-based Project 88 and Goethe‐Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan together present Mario Pfeifer's first solo in India. The exhibition includes his acclaimed exhibited installation project, entitled ‘A

Formal Film in Nine Episodes, Prologue & Epilogue’. Coincidentally, Mumbai is the city of its making. During his research and production, Pfeifer developed a multi‐layered, visually compelling and critically challenging film project; shot on 35 mm color negative in single takes with two Greater Bombay citizens unfamiliar with the process of producing a conceptual film but well informed about their own area, its local culture and diversity of languages.

In collaboration with his research assistants, the artist went on extensive location visits to observe everyday situations and activities he first considered on a formal level, approaching them, as he puts it, in a state of innocence– entering a complex environment without preconceptions.

By further investigating the social, urban, ethnographic, religious and cultural contexts inherent in his formal approach, he developed the structural concept of the film, later worked into the project's title. Presented as what Amira Gad defines as a ‘flexible installation’, Pfeifer suggests a loose ordering of his episodes, prologue and epilogue within the setting of an exhibition space, varying the number of projections and declining to specify the order and number of episodes to be screened together.

This flexibility creates the possibility for the projected material to be displayed in diverse narrative combinations and asks spectators to engage with the exhibition space and the filmic representation by applying their own individual gaze and critique, a personal process of translating the experience.

Pfeifer's images are akin to a deeper investigation of the city's growth from rural areas to high‐tech sites and planned cities, from manual labor to neoliberal, global forms of production; with its images resistant to any clearly defined genre, the film meanders between what are considered documentary and fictive notions of image production, pointing at the difficulties inherent in the act of representation per se and the artist's own involvement in a local context he would otherwise not be part of.

Mario Pfeifer looks to casts doubts on the social critique that such aesthetics evoke, which according to Alexander Koch, “itself might appear as a form of colonialist encroachment in today's globalized society.”