Monitor 7: New South Asian Short Film and Video
Presented by South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC)
March 24, 7:30 p.m. Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave., Toronto
The seventh annual Monitor: New South Asian Short Film and Video festival is a revealing peek into the variety of presentation strategies, filmic styles and sociopolitical concerns of contemporary South Asian artists, those living in South Asia and in the diaspora.
Monitor 7 programmer Ayesha Hameed, herself a performance and video artist currently based in London, worked with a team of Toronto-based film artists – including Pablo de Ocampo, artistic director of the Images Festival, Dinesh Sachdev, founder of Filmi, members of Monitor 7’s sponsoring collective, the South Asian Visual Arts Centre, and Erik Martinson, V tape’s outreach co-ordinator – to select a dozen short works from a pool of more than 50 submitted and requested works.
The common thread in the chosen works, Hameed notes, is the interest exhibited by the filmmakers in “taking inventories,” in examining the role of everyday objects (props, if you will) and their varied functions within time-based media.
Were I a columnist with The Economist, I might scratch my valet-shaved chin and hold forth on the booming South Asian economy, and then suggest that the artistic interest in commodities, in purchasable objects, was an obvious byproduct. But that is too simplistic a reading. It is also important to note that “South Asian” is a flawed catch-all term, one that should be read as South Asian(s).
However, granted all provisos, it is arguable that South Asian film/video has had a long fascination with the totemic, with idols (of all descriptions), talismans and treasured objects, from family photographs to lavish fabrics.
One need only look at works made by South Asian video artists in Canada in the 1980s, the dawn of the video art era, and witness said films’ near universal employment of bolts upon bolts of glittering textiles. Props have always played an important part in the South Asian dialogue between viewer and creator. For whatever happy reasons, the artists in this community have, by and large, dodged the life-denying curse of minimalism.
Monitor 7 is an especially lively assortment of new works. Among my favourites are Vivek Shraya’s Seeking Single White Male, a searing 1-minute video that juxtaposes changing images of a young man of indeterminate heritage against ugly, chat-room style messages about what is or is not attractive about “Indian boys.” Self-hatred and shadism, taboo subjects in progressive Indian circles, are bluntly, and literally, turned face-front toward the viewer.
Ambereen Siddiqui’s Lying In Wait is a sombre, haunting meditation on terrorism, in particular its effect on those left behind to wait for news. As a collection of voiceovers repeat and overlap, the various forms of information the speakers are waiting to gather – such as “waiting for text messages” and “waiting for phone calls” – build to a quiet howl. Meanwhile, the viewer is confronted by an empty, mausoleum-like balcony, a stone cube lit only by streetlamps. As the voices grow louder, flashes appear in the horizon. Bomb flashes? Lightning flashes?
Like the plaintive narrators, we cannot know exactly what is going on, can only share in their perpetual, cyclical anxiety. Only three minutes long, this video convincingly portrays hours and days worth of anxiety.
Capsule, by Shereen Soliman, unfolds gently but is far from soothing. Comprised almost entirely of close-ups of things found in a typical suburban home – everything from salt shakers to abandoned toys, and then, chillingly, on to medical apparatus and hoards of medications – Capsule is a narrative film conveying a story the viewer must partly make up him or herself.
