Passages through Passages presents fundamental works by CAMP, the Mumbai-based collaborative artist studio founded in 2007 by Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran, which can be viewed until July 4th, 2022, at Bait Al Serkal in Sharjah. It is a video project that allows travelling by new or recently rebuilt roads across Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and India. CAMP’s fundamental work in video and film, electronic media and public art forms has demonstrated how deep technical experimentation and artistic form have progressed.
We can feel movement and its context in the title Passages through Passages; art as an embodied explorer travels through the passages rearranging them. The exhibition has been organised during the world pandemic and flourishing nationalism, at a time when the world needs to be considered from a different point of view.
Made between 2006 and 2020, these projects include video and audio works, archives, interventions and collections, and draw upon the group’s distinctive artistic and research methods. Through them, CAMP addresses such topics as anxieties and inoculations about ‘public health’ under surveillance, technological methods and expectations, and movement as transport and as a different process of finding unexpected ways forward.
Other works that start to move in their own revelatory ways include exhibitions themselves such as the Annotated Gujarat and the Sea Exhibition (2011), cut out images from a newspaper archive in A Photogenetic Line (2019), or the faceted subcontinental movements of A Passage through Passages (2020). The things that do not move are the people in Al Jaar Qabla al Daar (2011), the camera in Bombay Tilts Down (2021), and a particular CAMP member.
On the museum’s ground floor, dedicated to the sea, viewers can watch a film project, From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf (2009–2013), commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation Production Programme Sharjah Biennial 11. Two other Sharjah-based projects, the book Wharfage and Radio Meena, recipients of the grand jury prize at Sharjah Biennial 9 (2009), are also on view.
