India is the land of the billion dollar film or "Bollywood" industry. It is also fast emerging a leader in the IT industry with enough prowesses to compete worldwide. It may therefore sound like a contradiction to state that video art in India is still at a nascent stage. India came into the international arena as late as the mid nineties with video installations by Nalini Malani and Vivan Sundaram, at a time when the dominance in New Media Art by the West was being broken by important contributions from the rapidly growing interesting productions from countries like South Korea and China.

The art works included in InterctivA'03 are an attempt to give an overview, albeit cursory, of some of the concerns of key artists working in the medium of video in India. The selection has tried to cover a range of concerns: from the political, art historical, ecological and ritual to the painterly and poetical, and it includes work by senior as well as younger artists working in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.

The videos by Nalini Malani, and Tejal Shah, a young artist based in Mumbai are overtly political works referring to the recent genocide in Gujerat (Jan 2002) in which the Muslims community was targeted by the Hindu community, shaking the very roots of democracy in India. Nalini's work is more painterly and she uses the frame of an important allegorical painting "Galaxy of Musicians" by the late 19th century Indian painter Raja Ravi Varma which shows eleven musicians, all women dressed in the different costumes of India signifying unity in diversity. What starts off as a visual fairy tale, where all parts of the nation play in harmony together, ends in a bloodbath. Tejal's work is more in the style of the documentary. Situated in a popular public recreational space of the balloon target shooting Ï hall at a public fair, the video takes place performatively where informal interviews of the public present are taken to reveal an appalling apathy towards the genocide in the public conscience.

The videos by Pooja Kaul and digital photographs by Vivan Sundaram maybe viewed as "re take" on the art historical figure Amrita Shergil, one of India's first modern painters. Often referred to as the Frida Kahlo of India, Shergil was a half-Indian, half-Hungarian woman who died mysteriously at a very young age. She has often caught the fancy of artists in India. The film by Kaul shows two Indian women on a train through Hungary mix fact with fantasy as they chase an elusive figure from the 1930s; The photomontages by Sundaram on the other hand could simply be stills from an imaginary film called amrita- that subsumes the encounters of the digital montage into a fictional narrative- a film in which a photo- dream love- play...where the artist sees seduction as central to these images. In the contrived ensemble inherent to the technique of digital photomontage, there is a revolving erotic made explicit; there is also an under layer of irony.

Subba Ghosh and Subodh Gupta view the notion of "waste" in distinctly different ways. While Ghosh's video has a deeper ecological undertone. Dealing with a being in stasis: locked into the eternal cycle of burial and exhumation, his work looks at waste not only as characterizing the city and its living but also reflecting on the contradiction within it as someone's waste becomes another means of livelihood. Gupta's video on the other hand is about a relationship between belief and ritual. In India cow dung has contradictory connotations; within spiritual belief it assumes a position of the cleanser/atoner whilst also having day-to-day associations with waste and the defiler.

Kiran Subbia's politically loaded piece comments humorously on the 'civilizing' process of eating with a knife and fork instituted by the British in India where eating with ones fingers is an accepted practice. Caught in a double bind, Subbiah states "Viewers in Europe identify me with the guy using his fingers while people back home tend to take the real me for the anglicized fork and knife user."

Ranbir Kaleka's installation "man with cockerel" is deeply poetic piece, which mirrors and maps each desperate nuance of dual desires: one to hold, the other to escape. A painterly video, this needs to be seen in a loop several times over.

I would like to thank Raul Ferrera-Balanquet for inviting video art from India at InteractivA'03 and for giving me the opportunity to share the same with you. I do hope this will allow for an exchange of ideas and debate in the future.

Pooja Sood
Independent Curator and art Consultant
[Curator/Consultant, Apeejay Media Gallery, New Delhi
Coordinator, KHOJ International Artist's Workshop, New Delhi]