PR.

From experimentations with the documentary film form to incorporate art, performance, text and abstraction, I find myself increasingly drawn to what lies beyond the practice of committed documentary image-making for mobilising and investigation. Today, the ‘embodied experience’ evokes my interest. Looking beyond the standalone film to see how engaged installation-making can create diverse narratives around ‘structures of feeling’ – ownership/precarity, vulnerability/comfort, alien-ness/belonging. Reimagining documentary as a practice to provoke responses beyond digitally active/sensorially passive interfaces, to multi-person/multi-media interventions that build emotional and textural engagements with the ‘seen’.

Featuring pre-recorded  videos and sound, live video feeds, photographs, objects, text and a gallery of mirrors, OPACITY creates a spatial experience in which binaries of inside/outside, onscreen/offscreen, private/public, select/commonplace are disrupted. Working in the interstices between planned images – documentary, popular, archival, live – and those created unpredictably through reflections and shadows, it continually locates/dislocates the physical body, projected body and perceived body across physical space, projected space and perceived space.

What is the potential of such practices to create layered, non-linear experiential dialogues with viewers/spectators? That is the question before me now.

 

Vani Subramanian

 

OPACITY was originally created while on a Fulbright Fellowship at Cornell University in 2012-2013.