'Two leads to dialogue' a video presentation at Experimenter

Compiled by Avijna Bhattacharya and Rikimi Madhukaillya who have been mentored by the Swiss curator, Mirjam Varadinis.

Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council in partnership with Experimenter Kolkata 
presents 
Two leads to dialogue 
a video presentation curated by Avijna Bhattacharya and Rikimi Madhukaillya from India who have been mentored by the Swiss curator, Mirjam Varadinis. 

at Experimenter, Kolkata 
Dates: 23, 24, and 25 July 2013 
Single screening: 4pm-7pm 

Participating artists: Alexander Hahn, Paribartana Mohanty, Ingo Giezendanner, Christoph Büchel's, San Keller, Anne Rochat, Katja Schenker, Zilla Leutenegger, Mithu Sen, Roman Signer, Nils Nova, Elodie Pong, Sujit Malik, Srijata Roy & Mrijtunjay Chatterjee, Prateek Sagar and Gian-Reto Gredig & Goran Galic.

The idea behind curating a programme of videos with works of Swiss and Indian artists generated from interactions between our mentor Mirjam Varadinis (Curator, Kunsthaus Zurich), Rikimi Madhukaillya and me when Pro Helvetia brought us together in New Delhi in 2011. Two years since then, with the support of Pro Helvetia, we are pleased to announce that a programme has been realised, one we aspired to produce.

A cultural dialogue is best carried out through effective communication, perhaps more responsively through two dimensional images in motion. The practice of substantiating opinions and ideas in visual arts through moving images has been evolving worldwide since the last few decades (with the advent of the camcorder and digital revolution), and in India through the 90s, owing to a culture that is dominantly shaped by information circulated by telecastings, cyber-spatial interactions, audio-visual publications (DVDs), video transmissions through mobile phone and so forth. This has apparently changed our cultural perceptions towards image making. Efforts to identify such changes are aspiring and absorbing at the same time, therefore our attempt to bring together a collection of video-works of Swiss and Indian artists both young and established, to initiate a dialogue and explore artistic productions of video art in both the countries, with analogous contexts, orientations and concerns.

A liquescent state of ideas from the artists of both countries, the compilation of video can largely be placed into four categories. There are videos which are interactive and performance based, videos/short animation films, then there are the videos that have a strong documentary self and the ones which very playfully have erased the borders of drawing individual images and those of moving ones.

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Mirjam Varadinis Mirjam Varadinis is an art historian, curator and writer based in Zürich, Switzerland. She has been a curator at Kunsthaus Zürich for the past ten years. Responsible for contemporary art at the Kunsthaus, Mirjam has curated many exhibitions including Aleksandra Mir: Switzerland and Other Islands (2006), Shifting Identities (2008), and Motion Picture(s) (2010). Mirjam has also co-curated the exhibition Broken Lines as a part of the annual art festival 'Printemps de Septembre' (2006) in Toulouse, France. She has edited 'Parkett: 20 Years of Artists' Collaborations'. As a curator she has many solo exhibitions to her credit, such as those of Rosa Barba, Adrian Paci, Mircea Cantor, Runa Islam, Tino Sehgal, Erik van Lieshout, Aleksandra Mir, Nedko Solakov, Urs Fischer, David Shrigley to name a few. In 2012, she co-curated 'TRACK' in Ghent (Belgium), together with Philippe Van Cauteren. In 2005 she launched the internet-platform www.azple.com in collaboration with Annie Wu.

Mirjam Varadinis was in India as the international jury member of the SKODA PRIZE 2012.