Critical Writing Index

We Shape Our Image and Thereafter Our Image Shapes Us

by Jacob Korczynski

South Asian Visual Arts Centre, 2012

Monitor 8, SAVAC's eighth annual screening of contemporary South Asian film and video offers a curated glimpse into the vast amount of work being created by South Asian artists internationally.

In his 1975 essay, Leaving the Movie Theater, Roland Barthes begins by placing his reader in a liminal space that is encountered by the author: exiting the architecture of a cinema, he moves us out to the architectural assemblage of the street which offers a multiplicity of available spaces that will further determine the body. Likewise, each screening is an assemblage. We form a temporary autonomous space, one that is composed of a social contract entered upon when we gather together within the architecture of the auditorium in the dark. The space of the cinema amplifies not only our location, but also what lies outside of it. For Monitor 8, what lies within the frame is the continuous reshaping of the contemporary South Asian cityscape, as well as reshaping of the bodies that locate themselves within it.

ITEM 2012.094 – available for viewing in the Research Centre

Videos, Artworks and Artists Cited

Echoed Moments in TimePromotesh Das Pulak

Delta: My Lovely TidingsKitsum Cheung

In_TransienceExta Mittal

In_TranscienceYashaswini Raghunandan

Silence ElsewhereTahrieh Lal

Rear-View MirrorPanchal Mansaram

Pectoralis Major (Version 2)Sukanya Ghosh

Jan VillaNatasha Mendonca

Blind SculptureAshiq Khondker

FacadesTal Amiran