Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

As history is mythologized to reinforce national imaginaries, what becomes the role of memory, of lived and imagined experience, in transforming and disrupting master narratives?

UnionDocs is delighted to present GEOGRAPHIES OF BELONGING, a series of film screenings and conversations curated with Senjuti Mukherjee, PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh. In NO PLACE LIKE HOME, the second program in this series, we’re delighted to welcome Shaina Anand, co-founder of CAMP, to screen and discuss Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar (The Neighbour Before the House,2009-2011).

Posturing as exceptions, scandalous emergencies light up our phone screens, when in fact the twenty-first century has been marked by a world caught in a permanent state of crisis. The last few decades have witnessed mass protests against global democratic erosion, generating a constant flow of amateur videos, photographs and sounds produced by citizens living in multi-screen ecosystems. As fatigue and forgetting are mobilized for diplomatic strategy, we turn to sites of counter-memory and forgotten histories to unsettle mainstream narratives of history, social memory and community.

In CAMP’s Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar (The Neighbour Before the House, 2009-2011), eight Palestinian families film via a pan-tilt-zoom CCTV camera mounted onto the roofs of their houses observing life and activities in their neighbourhoods of Jerusalem — in the old city, in the East Jerusalem neighbourhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan, and Greater Jerusalem boroughs like Bethany. Their voices and the images keep finding each other. Memories, desires and relationships with places shape how the camera moves. The images recorded are full of jest, humour, rage, desire, curiosity, and details. At once personal and political, this becomes an archiving of an occupied landscape and its effects near and far.

This interplay between location and experience, this understanding of geography through historical memory records the persistence of the occupation in the everyday and not as eruptions. Palestinian lives have been rendered through a visual framing of destruction and victimhood. Moving away from this, the film shows the possibilities of portraiture and chronicling histories from new visual positions.

We’re looking forward to a conversation with Shaina Anand following the screening and hope to see you there!

Special thanks to the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for coming on board as contributing partners for this series!

Program

Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar

CAMP (Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran, with Nida Ghouse, Shereen Barakat, Mahmoud Jiddah and Mahasen Nasser Eldin)

60 mins, 2009-2011

CCTV video with sync sound

Program Duration: 60 mins

Bios

CAMP (founded by Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran in 2007) is a Mumbai-based studio of people who are artists, architects, filmmakers, and technologists. They host long-running video archives Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, a rooftop cinema for the past 15 years, and make art that is possessed of an infrastructural imagination.

They have been producing work in film and video, electronic media, and public art forms, in a practice characterised by a hand-dirtying, non-alienated relation to technology. CAMP’s projects have engaged with complex social and technical assemblies: Energy, communication, transport and surveillance systems, ports, ships, archives, housing projects – things much larger than themselves. These are shown as unstable, leaky and contestable, in the sense of ultimately not having a fixed function or destiny, making them both a medium and stage for artistic activity.

Senjuti Mukherjee is a PhD student of Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh working on new media environments, dissident citizenship, video activism and the transforming art and politics of twenty-first-century documentary. She did a Master’s in Art History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and a Bachelor’s in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She has worked as an archivist, editor and curator in India for over a decade. During this time, she led archival projects in film publicity memorabilia, film and photography at Osian’s, Eka and Delhi Art Gallery. In recent years, she has commissioned and edited publications, including long-form research on visual and performance arts for the Serendipity Arts Foundation and multi-media research on South Asian film, video and photography for Alternative South Asia Photography.