Geographies Of Consumption: Bombay/Mumbai | Films

Geographies of Consumption | Bombay Mumbai, is a public art project conceived and curated by the Mohile Parikh Center. It critically investigates the impact of consumption on natural resources in the city, and on human bodies, our ecosystems and cultures. Interspersed in the project are study groups, film screenings, public lectures, and an annual symposia. The film program is designed to engage with different spaces in the city over the course of the year. Curated by Avijit Mukul Kishore and Rohan Shivkumar, the selected films respond to these spaces in an attempt to interpret multiple imaginations of geography and consumption.

Luminous People
Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Mechanical Love
Director: Phie Ambo

February 27, 2015 | 6.30 pm
Visitors Centre, CSMVS, Mumbai

Luminous People is a recreation of an event to commemorate the presence of the dead and the fading memories of the living, and of filmmaking.

Mechanical Love is a contemporary documentary set in what would usually be the futuristic landscape of science fiction. The film deals with artificial intelligence and human interface with life-like robots, which are designed as companions to human beings.

Both films talk of “human presence”, one in the context of the dead and the other of human machines. While the first film is a fiction drama made like a documentary, the second pushes our understanding of what we perceive as real. Between the themes explored in the films, the curators hope to open out a discursive space for conceptual ideas and imaginations concerning the relationship between nature and civilization, tangibility and abstraction.

Dharavi, Slum for Sale
Director: Lutz Konermann

April 30, 2015 | 4.00 pm
Colour Box, Dharavi Biennale, Dharavi

The second edition of the film program focuses on Dharavi. Speculations on its present condition and its possible future have led to a plethora of images and imaginations emerging from government organisations, private developers, non-governmental organisations and community groups. This has created a geography of desire and aspiration that shapes the imagination of the local communities.

Lutz Konermann’s documentary film focuses on the redevelopment proposal created by Mukesh Mehta, urban planner and consultant to the Dharavi Redevelopment Project. It follows the urban planner through the processes of state approval, and also documents the lives of the people in Dharavi as they access the impact the project. The film questions the very nature of development on homes and livelihoods, against mounting pressures of globalisation and capital.

Leviathan
Directors: Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel

June 30, 2015 | 5.30 pm
The Hive, Mumbai

The third edition of the film program is at The Hive, a community space located in Chuim, a fishing village in Khar. The film Leviathan (2012) takes us to another fishing community in New Bedford (New England) that formed the background for Herman Melville’s literary classic ‘Moby Dick,’ a story about a man and his obsession with a whale.

Leviathan is set on a fishing trawler in that context. Using many miniature Go Pro cameras attached to almost every conceivable part of the ship, the film creates an unreal universe and makes us identify with not only the human, but also every animate and inanimate part of that experience. Edited together into a non-linear and virtually wordless whole, we are plunged into a dark hallucinatory world where the sea rages, the wind blows, half-dead fish lie on the ship’s floor, and seagulls fly overhead for the dead fish on the deck. Boldly experimental and challenging, the film is a kinetic, spectacular work that bridges the gap between academic research and aesthetic experience.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel from the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University attempt to create a new way of understanding people and culture through interdisciplinary methods that combine the arts, the natural and social sciences, and the humanities.

To Let the World In | Volume 1 and 2
Director: Avijit Mukul Kishore

September 2 and 3, 2015 | 4.00 pm
Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai

The fourth edition of the film program is at the Sir J.J. School of Arts, Mumbai, and will respond directly to the space by focusing the discussion around the nature of art practice and the role of the academy. The aim is to open a discussion with the students of the art school on the shifts of art practice over the past two decades, and the increasing prominence of Indian art and its transformations of practice and consumption.

To Let the World In (2013) is a two-volume film project by Avijit Mukul Kishore in collaboration with Chaitanya Sambrani, that looks at a significant period in the history of contemporary Indian art from the early 1980s to the present day. It features three generations of celebrated Indian artists who share recollections, reminiscences and concerns about their practice. The film is based on the show titled ‘To Let the World In: Narrative and Beyond in Contemporary Indian Art’, curated by Chaitanya Sambrani for Art Chennai.

Day I: Film Screening | Volume I (93 mins)
Panel Discussion | 5.30 pm to 6.30 pm
Atul Dodiya and Avijit Mukul Kishore
Discussant: Noopur Desai

Day II: Film Screening | Volume II (52 mins)
Panel Discussion | 5.00 pm to 6.00 pm
Archana Hande, Shilpa Gupta, Kausik Mukhopadhyay and Rohan Shivkumar|
Discussant: Noopur Desai

Wasted
Director: Anirban Datta

January 8, 2016 | 5.00 pm
G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture, Mumbai

Ancient agrarian India believed nothing is waste. No Indian language has a word for waste. This concept was born with the industrial revolution and brought by colonial history upon an agrarian culture.Waste has now become a currency of development. ‘Wasted’ is a personal accord vis-à-vis India and the mountain of waste it produces as an aspirational economic giant.

This film was conceived around events that unfolded on the fringes of its primary subject. The loss of a dear friend prompted the film maker to reflect on life itself and his practice as a documentary film maker. The film tries to look back at material shot for his previous films and tries to use them as found footage.

Watermark
Directors: Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky

January 9, 2016 | 5.00 pm
G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture, Mumbai

Watermark is a feature documentary that brings together diverse stories from around the globe about our relationship with water: how we are drawn to it, what we learn from it, how we use it and the consequences of that use. The film visits the massive floating farms off China’s Fujian coast and the construction site of the biggest arch dam in the world – the Xiluodu. It examines the barren desert delta where the Colorado River no longer reaches the ocean. It witness how humans are drawn to water, from the U.S. Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach to the KumbhMela in Allahabad, where thirty million people gather for a sacred bath in the Ganges. It speak with scientists who drill ice cores two kilometers deep into the Greenland Ice Sheet, and explore the sublime pristine watershed of Northern British Columbia and reflects on the water-intensive leather tanneries of Dhaka.

Watermark is shot in stunning 5K ultra high-definition video and is full of soaring aerial perspectives, immersing the viewer in its images.

Curators:
Avijit Mukul Kishore is a film-maker and cinematographer based in Mumbai. He works in many genres of film and video making, and is actively involved in art, cinema and cultural pedagogy. He is co-curator at the FD Zone programme of Films Division India since its inception in 2012.

Rohan Shivkumar is an architect and urban designer from Mumbai and is the Deputy Director of the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies. He is interested in exploring cross disciplinary ways of reading and representation of cities.