Made in India in MAD LAB, Manchester


Made in India will be on show from the 4th to the 6th of in November 2010 at 
Mad Lab, Manchester Digital Laboratory, as a trailblazing launch event for Asia Triennial Manchester 11 (ATM11)





Made in India is a selection of creative videoworks made by artists living in Mumbay, Assam, Kolkata and Delhi and compiled by Ima Picó during a research residency in India in February 2010.

Selection made by Shankar Barua, Director of CeC, The Annual Carnival of Creativity. CeC & CaC (pronounced "Sek & Sak") is an annual global occasion to collectively seek out, manifest, learn from, connect with and enjoy a studied broad canvas of cutting-edge participation & content from India and the world, addressing the Creative Empowerment of Individuals by the burgeoning spread of Technology across multiple streams of human endeavour.

The creative duo behind TAXI, formed in 2005, are Kolkata-based Suman Samajpati and Sourav Roy Chowdhury. The duo artist group Taxi was. They work collaboratively, having evolved a unique style characterised by the merging of painting and photography.

Swimming around. Suman & Sourav (TAXI). Video. 2:34. 2009

Swimming around. Suman & Sourav (TAXI).

Cock-Tail. Paplu Deka. Cast - Sonal, Sameer, Nilima, Maada, Babul; Concept, Direction & Editing - Paplu Deka; Camera: Minturaj Deka; Production Manager - Aparaj; Producer - Mridupawan Bhagawati & Aparaj; Production - Nap-Sun's, India, 2009.

Cock-Tail. Paplu Deka. Video. 05:07. 2009

Cock-Tail. Paplu Deka.


Selection made by Vidya Shah, CMAC, Centre for Media and Alternative Communication. CMACworks in the field of art, design and culture. Its role has been to create an interface between artists from different genres, to facilitate and to provide a platform for production, cultural exchange of art and ideas, and dialogue in the visual and performing arts.

An alumnus of the National Institute of Design, India, and visiting scholar at the University of California, Davis and SOAS, London University, Parthiv is a photographer, film maker and a graphic designer. He has made several documentary films, curated exhibitions and has several photo-books to his credit. He is founder-Director of Centre for Media and Alternative Communication (CMAC). His photographs have been exhibited in India, Australia, Bangladesh, Germany, Netherlands, Japan, Switzerland, Spain, Russia, U.K., U.S.A.

Barbed wires and beautiful skies: Looking at Kashmir in Frames. Parthiv Shah. India 2009, 6 min.
The body and a landscape - moments, people, events, places and processes that define lives of people in Kashmir, in a photographic exploration where everyday violence fuses with Kashmir’s fabled beauty.

Barbed wires and beautiful skies: Looking at Kashmir in Frames. Parthiv Shah.


Selection made by Ima Picó:

Alana Victoria Hunt is an Australian visual artist living in Delhi. She is interested in the social mediation of cultural forms and how this is influenced by the contemporary experience of globalisation. She explores this predominately through an interdisciplinary art practice, but also writes (often in fragments) and works with media (often on radio, but occasionally with film and video). Through various forms and processes she explores, in both a practical and theoretical sense, the minute narratives and experiences of daily life within a broader framework of socially oriented media practices and relational, connective and experiential aesthetics.

It's a human relations thing. Alana Victoria Hunt. 15:40. 2009
This is a video basically consisting of the signs in the female toilets of a girl’s student hostel at a university campus. I became interested in the different ways people communicate, through written language and visual form, over the issue of cleanliness in a shared communal space.

It's a human relations thing. Alana Victoria Hunt.

Dhanya Pilo aka Decoy is a visual jockey who uses her film making and photographic skills to create images of India that are evocative, personal and compelling. She is happiest while creating visual sequences spontaneously, while seeking a connection with the music and DJ. Dark, happy and calm, Decoy works as a film maker, designer and a visual artist from her studio in Bombay, the teeming hub of India’s artistic and film community.

36Hkz. Sounds by Urban Hippy Project and visuals by Decoy. 36:00. 2007

36Hkz. Sounds by Urban Hippy Project and visuals by Decoy

1st piece. Dhania Pilo/VJ DECOY. Music Jatin Vidhayarthi/Masta Justy. 4:33. 2008

1st piece. Dhania Pilo/VJ DECOY. Music Jatin Vidhayarthi/Masta Justy


Selection made by Iram Ghufran. Sarai Media Lab. Delhi. Sarai is a programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, (CSDS) one of India’s leading research institutes with a commitment to critical and dissenting thought and a focus on critically expanding the horizons of the discourse on development, particularly with reference to South Asia. We are a coalition of researchers and practitioners with a commitment towards developing a model of research-practice that is public and creative, in which multiple voices express and render themselves in a variety of forms.

The streets of Delhi are anthologies of mobile poetry. Auto rickshaw cabs - three-wheel motor scooters and Delhi's most ubiquitous form of personal public transport - are surfaces inscribed with pithy couplets that span a spectrum of sentiment ranging from laconic irony to surreal humour, from gentle heresy to rage and romantic ardour. Auto-poems, read fleetingly as rickshaws speed by, register as precise and personal annotations on the epic text of a vast metropolis.

Autopoesis. Ravikant Shama and Prabhat Kumar Jha.
Realised in collaboration with Sarai Media Lab, 2005
Editing: Iram Ghufran
Acknowledgements: Ashish Mahajan, Joy Chatterjee

Autopoesis. Ravikant Shama and Prabhat Kumar Jha

Satyajit Pande is a cinematographer and a photographer. He lives and works in Mumbai.

Manus is the anatomical name for the terminal segment of a forelimb - in humans, the hand and wrist. In colloquial Hindi and Marathi, two languages spoken extensively in Mumbai, 'manus' also means 'human  being'.
Mumbai's suburban railway network ferries millions of commuters every day, and epitomises the tenuous grip that the inhabitants of Mumbai have on their city. Hands in trains create constellations of accidental intimacy, enter found solidarities, speak a vocabulary of silent gestures. A routine of handclasps anchors and cushions the daily uncertainties of a dense metropolis.

Manus. Satyajit Pande. Single channel video. 07:41. 2006
Production credits: Camera: Setu/Satyajit Pande, Editing: Shan Mohammed
Thanks: Amit Choudhury, Surabhi Sharma, Kavita Pai, Sunil Shanbag, Amitabh Kumar

Manus. Satyajit Pande

Selection made by Shazeb Shaikh, Curator and Founder – Street Festival of Home-made Videos. Shazeb S. is the Founder of Conjure Arts and Media, an upcoming integrated arts business based out of Mumbai and New York. With Conjure, Shazeb aims to put together an artist community with a wide focus across art forms, media and genre to promote the works of established and upcoming global artists and their collaborations to produce releases and exhibitions in film, music, writings, social projects, visual and installation art. Though still in its first year (2010), Conjure has already produced a feature length film in India (Kshay) and a medium length film (Stealing Suburbia) in New York besides looking forward to unleash its first global integrated arts exhibition with the launch of a large format coffee table book titled Dispersed Diaries which brings together poetry, art, music and videos. With this financially-backed artist collective and arthouse (Conjure), the motive is to create a new channel to market art internationally with a sound business-end created by some of India's top business strategy and management consultants. Shazeb is partnering this new regrouping of artists and hopes to bring on multiple unique artists in different media while maintaining the purity and essence of creativity.
In the past, Shazeb S. has established 3rd Thought Entertainment, an integrated-arthouse with a global artist collective of 32 artists from 14 countries. Shazeb is a multidisciplinary artist with a body of work in art (traditional and digital), music (IDM), and writings (classical poetry, epic poetry, prose) and films. He is also a co-curator at CeC 2011 (Carnival of e-Creativity), an annual global occasion to collectively seek out, manifest, learn from, connect with and enjoy a studied broad canvas of cutting-edge participation & content from India and the world, addressing the Creative Empowerment of Individuals by the burgeoning spread of Technology across multiple streams of human endeavour. Shazeb is also a core member of The Wall Project, a Mumbai- based social arts project that has gained mass popularity and drive with the citizens and governing bodies of Mumbai city.

What began as a simple idea to bring people together by requesting video clips from their everyday lives or professions is now rapidly growing across personal networks and is titled “Street Festival of Home-made Videos”. As the title suggests, the videos that you will get to see in our collections are candid, honest and a slice of life which are played back-to-back to create a long video file intersecting through lives and experiences that would have probably been never shared on a physical public platform such as a street. So, yes we get videos from the general public and screen them in streets with invitations to those who submit it, their friends and of course anyone and everyone in the localities or streets we screen in. The final experience is one large get together of different people from a vast cross-section who will eventually all become friends and know more about each other through the videos.
From a curatorial point of view, the only discretion the festival makes is in ensuring that the videos don’t have any religious, political or explicit messaging. What then comes out of the filtering are videos from life, things people do, incidences that were lucky enough to be caught on camera and so on. Street Festival of Home-made Videos is an initiative by Conjure Arts and Media in association with The Wall Project and its first screening was held at the socio-cultural hub of Bazar Road in Bandra (Mumbai) during May 2010 and is slowly but steadily gaining pace with screening requests and submissions from around the world.
Shazeb S.
C’mon Amul Macho. Ankit Mehrotra. (Part of the Street Festival of Home-made Videos)

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