ARCUREA – Inspirations, Impulses, Hopes
C. S. Venkiteswaran

“.. the task of curating is to make junctions, to allow different elements to touch. You might describe it as the attempted pollination of culture, or a form of map-making that opens new routes through a city, a people or a world…” (Hans Ulrich Obrist)

Changing Shades of the Curatorial

Curation or curating, terms that were associated with arts, museums, galleries and film festivals, has now become a catchword for assemblage of all kinds and across domains – of culture, communication and consumption. It is used to indicate the act and art of exploring, assembling and/or exhibiting art experiences through select conceptual trajectories, new contexts or cultural intersections. Archival and contemporary resources, tangible and intangible traditions, live and past performances – all constitute its sources of inspiration, triggers for contextualisation and sites for manifestation. The curatorial premises span the spatial or temporal, conceptual or sensual: it could be explorations of locations/sites, juxtaposition of temporalities or sensorial experiences. 

But most often curation becomes the mere act of bringing together works of audio-visual art or performances under a theme. As the slogan goes, the need of the hour is to ‘stop curating! Start thinking about curation!’. So, if one could go beyond such compilations, curation becomes a creative act of discovery, dialogue and critical engagements with pasts, presents and futures – of art, life, culture, history and politics: an art/act of triggering and provoking new conversations, creating interesting and disturbing juxtapositions, and making possible stimulating interfaces between genres, traditions and schools of thought and practice. It calls for deep understanding about art/cultural history, the daring to transgress disciplinary boundaries and a passion to forge and envision new connections and intersections.

Traditions of Curating

Is the act, art and function of what is called curating alien to the Indian cultural scene? Is it something that developed solely out of museum practices and art exhibitions? If one looks at curation in the wider perspective of creating ‘sociabilities, collectivities and convivialities’, we can see its manifestations in many of our festivals and celebrations, religious and secular: the bringing together and calibration of various arts, artists, ritualistic and cultural activities across different sites and in defined temporal sequences have been essential aspects of many of our ‘traditional’ festivities like Durga Puja, Kumbh Mela, Ram Lila, Thrissur Pooram, Uroos festival etc. All the village/community festivals include complex and diverse elements of installations, performances, rituals and roles. Though they may look chaotic and diffuse from the outside, they follow certain order/patterns and are calibrated assemblages of ritual acts, cultural events, and collective celebrations, almost always punctuated by meditative moments and reflective interludes. Many of them have also always easily adapted new modes of expression, forms of celebration and technologies of display. Obviously, these collective and community festivities have evolved through time, through complex processes – social and formal – of inclusion and exclusion, adoption and adaptation, negotiation and hybridisation. The processes of evolution of these festive events, the various socio-economic and cultural negotiations that shape its patterns and forms etc need to be studied in depth. Maybe one could call such events as ‘community curations’ – event-forms/formats that have evolved from within certain socialities, spatialities and temporalities. But, is it possible to draw lessons from these events? What are their strategies in terms of choice of content (some are fixed while some of them change, some are old, while new ones are always included), the integration of role plays (intentional and strategic, and also playful and random), engagements with power structures, and spatio-sequential negotiations (who, where and in what order etc) in programming? 

Why Arcurea?

Among various art institutions, academies, galleries and museums across India also, the practice of curating and showcasing works of art, artefacts and artists have been prevalent for a long time. It includes various national cultural festivals organised by literature and art academies, and global events like the Triennale, International film/theatre festivals etc. But most of them have followed conventional curatorial conventions, programming practices and aesthetic protocols. Barring a few exceptions, such practices have seldom been critically analysed, researched, documented and theorised upon, especially from an Asian or Indian perspective. 

Considering the wealth of cultural resources in India – in the form of artefacts and objects in the archaeological and other museums, documents and texts, images and audio-video materials in various public and personal archives, the huge repositories of diverse musical institutions and folk arts across the country, the curatorial potential and opportunities they offer, as well as the challenges they pose, are immense and complex. 

It is all the more so in the field of Indian cinema, where thoughtfully and provocatively curated film programmes are still a rarity. This is despite the fact that Indian cinemas (always plural) constitute one of the most vibrant, diverse and prolific of film industries in the world. Such an incomparable wealth of cinematic narratives, materials and archives offer opportunities to seek fresh avenues of historicising, modes of assemblage and flights of curatorial imagination.

Archive | Curate | Restore

The liquidity of capital, the mobility of bodies, the connectivity of localities form a complexity that outstrips any single methodology, intellectual or political tradition, or medium. (Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord (Eds), Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema)

Arcurea’s appeal ‘Archive, Curate, Restore’ is a call to film students, scholars and cinephiles to look at film history, culture and archives from new angles and fresh perspectives. All these acts/arts – of archiving, curating and restoring – are interconnected, and offer synergistic possibilities. For, any act of curation prompts one to dig into archives – physical or virtual – which most often leads to need/call for restoration. Conversely, restorations and discoveries of film materials also always trigger curatorial imagination. Arcurea’s vision is to further deepen such linkages and interconnections.

Arcurea @ SRFTI

The idea of Arcurea emerged out of the felt need for an academic and institutional platform to probe into the art, theory and practice of film curation. The venue of Arcurea – the Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute – is also significant as one of the objectives of Arcurea is to include film curation as part of the pedagogy and curriculum in film schools in India.  The city of Kolkata where SRFTI is situated is also extremely significant as it was one of the most prominent sites of origins of Indian cinema and home to many of its pioneers and pioneering institutions and film creations. 

We hope to convert Arcurea into an annual festival of film curation at SRFTI, where the curatorial art and practice, concepts and imaginations will be discussed, theorised and showcased. 

Art/Act of Film Curation

It’s natural to expect that such a strong tendency of the transformation of stable forms into forms of mobility could not be confined solely to means of form: this tendency exceeds the boundaries of form and extends to subject and theme. (Eisenstein on Disney)

At the most basic level, curating films is the act of creating contexts and connections, historical, socio-political or conceptual. All the processes involved in film curation are equally important and challenging: the identification and selection of films or film-related materials could be driven by an idea, concept or theme. It could be explicative or polemical, exploratory or intersectional; it could be an attempt to ponder or interrogate certain concepts, or to trigger dialogues through creation of challenging contexts and juxtapositions. It naturally demands a deep understanding about history, technology and aesthetics of the medium, as well as the socio-political issues and global media ecology encompassing or enclosing it. The potential resources could be as diverse as texts/documents, voices/sounds/music, and images, still or moving, and the final outcome could be an exhibition, an art event or film festival, the manifestation or display of which could be physical or virtual, online or offline. 

The digital era has expanded the possibilities on all fronts: right from sourcing necessary inputs, textual, visual or audio, to the choice of platforms of display/screening and modes of engagement with the spectators. The age of Expanded Cinema we live in is an immersive, interactive, and interconnected and is characterised by synesthesia, intermediality and a global public. The malleability and mobility of the image that Eisenstein was referring to now extends to the entire field of digital screen culture, encompassing imagination, production, consumption, appreciation, sharing, screening, storage and the endless recycling and repurposing of images. Such radical shifts, in turn, have also transformed curatorial imagination. As for the vocation of the curator, Nick Waterlow’s testament could be a starting point:

“A curator’s Last Will and Testament: Passion:

1. An Eye for Discernment
2. An Empty Vessel
3. An Ability to be Uncertain
4. Belief in the Necessity of Art + Artists
5. A Medium – Bringing a Passionate + Informed Understanding of Works of Art to an audience in ways that will Stimulate, Inspire, Question,
6. Making Possible the Altering of Perception” 

Arcurea is a beginning, an attempt to curate a programme on film curation, and an invitation to think about curation, anew, tangentially and subversively.

References:

Eisenstein on Disney, Seagull Books, 1986

Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ways of Curating, 2015

Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord (Eds), Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema, University of Toronto Press, 2007

Nick Waterlow, A Curator’s Last Will and Testament, 2009