VAF@The Guild, 2011

The Mumbai based Guild Gallery presents a Video & Animation Film Festival (VAF@The Guild, 2011). It’s a first of its kind project taking place in the city.

Curated by Delhi based critic and curator, JohnyML, this innovative project revolves around the new concepts of video and animation filmmaking in the contemporary art world. JohnyML was also incidentally the initiator and curator of Video Wednesdays @ Gallery Espace, the first ever year long video art exhibition in 2008-09.

Aditi Chitre, Iram Ghurfan, Gigi Scaria, Kavita Singh Kale, K.M.Madhusudhanan, Neha Thakar, Pooja Iranna, Riyas Komu, Samia Singh, Srinivas Bhakta and Vidya Kamat are the participating artists. As it is an ongoing project more artists will be featured in the coming sessions. As an exhibition strategy, VAF @ The Guild uses both the plasma screens and projection systems to exhibit the video and animation films. These works will be shown in loop and after a week of the project’s commencement, the videos and artists may change as more artists and their works will add on.

Explaining the background of this unique project, the curator observes: “With the collapsing boundaries between different art genres more and more interdisciplinary practices get space and appreciation in the field of visual arts as a part of the general cultural production. The galleries today are aware of this fact and they have started facilitating such works of art and projects. However, in India exclusive video and animation projects are not still in vogue. VAF @ The Guild is one of such pioneering efforts to showcase the videos and animation films of the eminent as well as emerging artists of India,”

Internationally videos have been around in the mainstream visual culture for a long time now. However of late animation films as a genre of video making is gaining ground and a lot of young emerging artists especially with training in art/design/technology are experimenting and coming up with new genre of works. By bringing video and animations on the same platform, The Guild hopes to open up new dialogues.

(Information courtesy: The Guild, Mumbai)