Film UbuWebShaina Anand (b. 1975)
Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar AKA The Neighbour Before The House (2012)
Shaina Anand is a filmmaker and artist, and a co-initiator of CAMP, a space “in which ideas and energies gather, and become interests and forms” and Padma, the online video archive. She has been working independently in film/video since 1997.
CAMP came together as a group in 2007, initially consisting of Shaina Anand (filmmaker and artist), Sanjay Bhangar (software programmer) and Ashok Sukumaran (architect and artist). By the time of setting up CAMP in Mumbai, the artists Anand and Sukumaran had already strong and well-recognized individual practices. Sukumaran had been awarded the first prize of the UNESCO digital arts award in 2006 and the prestigious Golden Nica of the Prix Ars Electronica the following year, 2007. He had lectured at venues such as the Tate Modern, and participated in the Singapore Biennial, 2006. Anand had done a series of well received projects with contemporary image media, and had exhibited at venues such as the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Serpentine Gallery London, Nottingham Contemporary, Cornerhouse Manchester, Khoj and Sarai New Delhi, Powerplant Toronto and more. CAMP’s reason to exist is that it produces and sustains long duration and sometimes large-scale artistic work. It combines film, video, installation, software, open-access archives and public programming with broad interests in technology, film and theory. Its projects over the past five years have shown how deep technical experimentation and artistic form can meet. Their work is closely tracing global phenomena: ships, CCTV, the emotional state of workers and guards, phone leaks,cinematic, digital and energetic media. That is does so with a real intimacy with the material, a committed politics, a care for the formal and experiential, and their utterly unique combination of skills is seen in the span of their activities and their mark on the global art world. Recent exhibitions include: Sharjah Biennial (2013), dOCUMENTA 13 (2012), Gwangju Biennial (2012), New Museum Triennial (2012). CAMP are co-initiators of the online footage archive http://pad.ma, and the newcinema archive http://indiancine.ma. (Their recent feature-length experimental documentary ’From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf’ was awarded the Jury mention at Festival International de Cinema, Marseille and has been screened at BFI London Film Festival, DocLisboa, the Viennale, among others.)