Work by two award winning artists and lecturers in the School of Music & Fine Art will be shown in a thought-provoking film programme in India. Settlement by Adam Chodzko, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, and The Whale from filmmaker and Associate Lecturer in Fine Art, Stephen Connolly, will be featured in a film screening programme called Postcard Views on Tuesday 24 November at 1 Shanthi Road Gallery, Bangalore, an art space founded by Suresh Jayaram that nurtures creativity and cutting edge art practice, situated in the centre of the city. Artists explore landscape from the context of ‘man-made’ environments driven by regeneration processes, political spatial division and wasteland management. Allowing a dialogue between different geographical locations – India and Europe – the programme raises notions, still relevant today, concerning imperial gestures and globalisation, where colonial powers’ seem to come along in disguise of rich investors. How do we interact with public space made available by the state or a colonial power structure? How do we become aware of these strategies of power? The artistic approach seems to help trace, reveal and re-evaluate those strategies within a landscape’s or a city’s layered residues.
The Studio/Gallery at 1 Shanthi Road provides space for slide lectures, small conferences, installations, performances, screenings and informal gatherings. It is administered by a not- for- profit trust Visual Art Collective and since its inception in 2003, has grown to house artists from diverse countries in its residency programmes. To date, the space has hosted and shown artists from every continent (and virtually every country) in the world.
Context for Postcard Views:
German landscape architect GH Krumbiegel (1865-1956) went to London in 1888 in order to help design Hyde Park and the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, London. He subsequently settled in India at the beginning of the 20th century and designed major botanical gardens in Ooty and Bangalore after the model of British parks. A system of ‘park’ was thus transplanted to India and other countries, and landscape architecture became part of the British colonial programme. Bangalore is said to be both the ‘new Silicon Valley’ and a ‘Garden City’, yet is trying to come to terms with large areas of inner city wasteland. In Postcard Views, the artists map out situations where control and power seem to be firmly encoded within landscape and where parks and monuments seem to reveal or memorialise certain cultural values. Our human instinct to consistently reorganise nature and landscape ac- cording to cultural perspectives and political control is laid bare.
More information:
The Gallery http://www.1shanthiroad.com/
Programme for Postcard Views:
Mike Marshall, Days like these, 2003, 3.24 mins., UK
Johanna Domke, Stultifera Garden, 2008 11.35 mins., D
Adam Chodzko, Settlement, 2004, 10 mins., UK
Robert Crosse, The Speed of Change, 2015, 2.40 mins., UK
Stephen Connolly, The Whale, 2005, 9.15 mins., UK
Matthew Murdoch, Being There, 2006, 4.30 mins., UK
Ann Donnelly, Political Landscape, 2007, 7 mins., IE
Claudia Kapp, You lose, 2011, 4 mins., D
Semiconductor, All the Time in the World, 2005, 4.42 mins., UK
Michelle Deignan, Ways to Speculate, 2014, 4.20 mins., UK
Genevieve Staines, Ruins in Reverse, 2005, 5.50 mins., AU
Daniel Beerstecher, Mas Continua a Vida, 2014, 5.18 mins., D
Stephen Connolly is an artist filmmaker. His award winning single screen work explores the interface between spectatorship, material culture and subjectivity, and has been widely screened at film and media festivals internationally since 2002. His work is distributed by the LUX and has been acquired by the Artist Moving Image Collection of the British Film Institute and a number of US Universities.
Stephen is a PhD candidate in Fine Art, a Graduate Teaching Assistant and Kent 50 Scholar. His doctoral practice as research looks at the representation of capital as material environment in artists film and video and the use of ‘assemblage’ and an Actor Network framework can further this audio-visual exploration. Recent conferences as a contributor include In Media Res at Harvard US; Besides the Screen at USP São Paulo BR; and Critical Topographies at Kingston UK.http://www.bubblefilm.net/projects/sketches.htm
Adam Chodzko’s art explores the interactions and possibilities of human behaviour. Exhibiting internationally since 1991, Chodzko works across media, from video installation to subtle interventions, with a practice that is situated both within the gallery and the wider public realm.
After studying the History of Art at the University of Manchester and Fine Art as a Masters at Goldsmiths College London, Chodzko has exhibited at numerous venues around the world. These include the Tate Britain, Venice Biennale, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Istanbul Biennial and locally at the Folkestone Triennial. He was shortlisted for the prestigious Jarman Award in 2015.
http://www.adamchodzko.com/