"Nani Ghar / नानी घर Images meant the truth; in our school textbooks, of our childhood and definitely of the world beyond; or so we believed. The authority of images as truth was only challenged when I started to make my own (images and meanings). To make my images was to build my world, the autonomy in authorship was liberating but soon, one realizes that this autonomy is a consequence of privilege.Image-making has become an integral part of our lives. We are photographing and filming our food, our friends/family and also ourselves constantly. One can accept this as a practice of creating and maintaining an archive, a live archive that will influence our understanding of our past and hence ourselves. We are heavily into the creation of our image not just for today, but for the years and generations to come. How can this archive then be read and does it communicate a sense of our identity? My grandmother and I ask each other where we are from, individually and collectively, as citizens of the world. We reflect together, she with her shard of mirror and I, with mine. The only scope for mistake in this process is to believe that our shard can reflect the whole truth."

"Hello, I’m Savyasachi and I record everyday videos, sounds and images. Sometimes I make films out of them and sometimes I just play them back to myself. I am primarily interested in the everyday mundane and its reflections/influences on the lives of people across generations and cultures. At present, I am interested in exploring the relationships between photography and film as a medium, as a mode of representation and as a form of public archive/documentation."
"Hello, I am Harsha Menon and I make films and sound pieces for the cinema and gallery. As an artist and anthropologist, I am interested in post-colonial theory, social practice, sonic ethnography, and transnational feminisms. I teach contemporary art, film and visual anthropology. My present project explores friendship as an aesthetic at a Buddhist nunnery."

ANTART FieldWorks #10: Savyasachi Anju Prabir and Harsha Menon

In our first talk of the series, anthropologist Christine Moderbacher presents the ongoing project “Moving Ants on a Painted Tree”, made in collaboration with the artist Iris Blauensteiner. Reflecting one of the central ideas of the ANTART Network, “Moving Ants on a Painted Tree” is a project that seeks to advance the dialog between art and anthropology through combining ethnographic field research and artistic tools of representation. However, in practice, the two researchers/artists also reached limitations and faced difficulties that often remain unspoken. Christine Moderbacher will discuss these challenges and unfold the at times different approaches, reflecting on how art and anthropology diverge and converge.

(The project “Moving Ants on a Painted Tree” is supported by Viertelfestival, Otto Mauer Fonds, Gemeinde Berg, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Halle.)

 

Christine Moderbacher is an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. Completing her PhD at the University of Aberdeen in 2019, she is currently working at the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. Her documentary films are shown in international film festivals and received a number of prizes.

ANTART FieldWorks #1: Christine Moderbacher

For anthropologists and artists “doing fieldwork” in contemporary worlds, art can be much more than an object of investigation. Curation and creation through visual, audio, or performing arts are at the heart of their work, extending the established anthropological interest in writing as a medium of thought and knowledge sharing. This exhibition presents works by anthropologists and artists who break disciplinary boundaries, and whose practice foregrounds experimental, and open approaches to the theme “field/works”. 

This series is curated by Jen Clarke and Maxime Le Calvé. We intend to provide a new space for discussion around and across the thematic of the virtual exhibition "Field/Works": https://antart.easaonline.org/ 

All members of ANTART (EASA) are all invited to attend. If you wish to participate in a particular talk with a short paper (5 minutes) which would resonate with the topic or — even better — with the artwork presented in that talk, please get in touch with us.

ANTART FieldWorks #1: Christine Moderbacher

ANT ART

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