"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

Writing the Time Lag is a conclusion of Lee Tzu-Tung’s four-year political experience in Taiwan and America. She takes the artist’s body in the field as the form for performance art and the recorder for video art, experiments how through fieldwork, art and artist could serve or be transformed in politics.

She joined Taiwan’s legislation procedures, election campaigns, organized indigenous movements, gender movements, and a bilingual political press as an undercover of political activist, so to explore the integrity of art-researches, the reason for the political fever and furthered her reflection on modernization and its effect on Taiwan indigenous people, especially with the indigenous women and queers’ life.

Writing the Time Lag is an experimental ethnography with the stream-of-conscious narration. It seemingly wanders over various topics, including the transformation of Taiwan’s national identification, how cross-cultural marriage works in modernity, how indigenous queer fit in their tradition, ending with the reflection of how internationalization in contemporary art effects each creator’s mind.

The film is made with the interviewees through a participatory process and completed by an all-female film crew. All the 50mm shots in the film are directed or operated by the interviewees.

 

Lee Tzu-Tung is a conceptual artist. Her participatory projects integrate anthropological research and political activism. She examines how one can survive, manipulate, and regain the autonomy of political identities, focusing on the hegemony of Chinese Sino-centrism, the trauma of modernity, and the current epistemological injustice. She surfs with performances, web-art, installations, fictional and experimental films, and plays along the borders of contemporary art, academia, and politics. Tzu-Tung experiments how art as a method can test the contemporary form of art, technology, and authorities.

ANTART FieldWorks #12: Lee Tzu-Tung

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 #12: Lee Tzu-Tung

ANT ART

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