Public Art Grant 2020 | —out-of-line—

FICA is pleased to announce that the FICA Public Art Grant 2020 has been granted to Suvani Suri, Sonam Chaturvedi, Kaushal Sapre, Radha Mahendru, Aasma Tulika and Jaidev Deshpande for their project —out-of-line— | a year long call that seeks to participate in the infrastructures of and around a call as a mode for speculating the idea of public(s).

The jury for the Public Art Grant 2020 consisted of member of the union Clark House Initiative Mumbai, lecturer in curatorial studies at NABA Milan Zasha Colah, member of the art collective Desire Machine Collective and professor at IIT Guwahati Mriganka Madhukaillya, and Vidya Shivadas and Annalisa Mansukhani from FICA. They took note of the themes that were prioritized this year via our applicants and their proposals. These included developing modes of responding to the crises in environment and ecology, addressing gender-based violence and mental health through community outreach, the revival and conservation of traditional knowledge systems and folk art, and a significant emphasis on crafting pedagogies in art and learning for the contemporary moment. There were also a number of applications working on oral traditions.

Acknowledging the consistencies in exploration and conceptualisation that have been evident in the -out-of-line- project over the past two years, the jury felt the collective's desire to participate in and delve deeper into infrastructures around the idea of a call - to action, of speculation, toward immediacy and interconnectedness - was a timely well-researched proposition in a time of flux and uncertainty, assisting and furthering the aegis of the Grant that encourages criticality in considerations of public space. They felt the proposed collaboration went beyond monumentality and toward the space of orality as reconstituting what is meant by public art, working towards the creation of common spaces with a far greater engagement with low-tech ecosystemic expanse of modern telecommunications and the notions of community, public space and gathering that emerges through the same.

—out-of-line—'s methodology is built through the framework of a call. For the current year, they propose to initiate two 'calls,' where each call will kickstart a cluster of public interventions and artistic experiments in the form of automated phone calls and chatbots, workshops and intensives, reading sessions and gatherings, microservices and makers’ spaces, —ool— hopes to toy with the notion of the site as a temporary and modulating situation as well as the pertinent question of public participation. Accumulating process documentation over the year to reflect upon and annotate, —ool— wishes to spend time considering the different possibilities of publication and circulation that this exercise could lead to.

About the recipient: 

—out-of-line— is a collaborative practice invested in creatively thinking about the social experiences of communicating that are bound to contemporary techno-culture and embedded within the economies of attention and time. -ool- began in August 2019, as a self initiated group exhibition of sound works transmitted over the telephone line using automated calling systems. Since then, -ool- has been facilitating a multifold examination of the telecommunications ecosystem and its relationship to the production and propagation of cultural imaginaries, along with an evolving cohort of artists, designers, researchers, programmers and musicians. Along with the virtual happenings activated as a part of the pilot in 2019, an on-site version of -ool- appeared as part of a group show Real Time Tactics within KHOJ-CISA 2019 Exhibitions at IIC, Delhi.

—ool— gathers: Programmes Calendar 2022 - 2023

-ool- gathers- #1

Tue, Nov 15 at FICA Reading Room

Film screening & Discussion

The Sound of Friendship: Warm Wavelengths in a Cold, Cold War by Anandita Bajpai, followed by a discussion with the director Anandita Bajpai and co-writer, cinematographer @jyothidaskv

-ool- gathers- #2

Tuesday, 27 Dec at FICA Reading Room

Listening Session: Placeholder for a Whale’s Itch

An album by Lantian Xie, Alla Semenovskaya, Aarushi Surana, Aasma Tulika and Kaushal Sapre.

The whale comes into the modern consciousness as a fuel source, but also as a measure of scale, then gets entangled in undersea cables while trying to scratch an itch. The whale becomes a placeholder to read and grasp the world. ‘Placeholder for a Whale’s Itch’ is an audio album that weaves together texts, speech acts, incidents, voice generators, simulations, whale conspiracies and undersea internet cables to express ideas around infrastructures associated with acts of communicating.

-ool- gathers- #3

Wed, Jan 25, Wed at FICA Reading Room

Film screening & Discussion:
GROTESKKBASILISKK! MINERAL MIXTAPE (2022), Mochu
Video, 26 mins

GROTESKKBASILISKK! MINERAL MIXTAPE looks at online subcultures premised on rapid technological acceleration that also harbor a strong imperialist cultural nostalgia. A peculiar futurism emerges out of this anomalous combination, closely allied to big tech and the genre tactics of science fiction and horror. In the video, Mochu drifts through the strange complicity between the techno-futurist desire to eliminate politics and its obsession with humorous, low-resolution worlds. Actors include lost faces, defiled statues, anime chatrooms, demonic cats, and pestilential affect-objects.

-ool- gathers- #4

Wed, Feb 1 at FICA Reading Room

An echo too late | Artist talk with Merve Ertufan

Merve Ertufan makes installations and sculptural arrangements with video and text. Her practice engages with what might be called the microphysics of the mind— observing inconsistencies, gaps and dead-ends in language and habit. Minor autobiographical fictions are made in the process, entangled in riddles and impossible stories.

In this session, we will be dwelling on delays, concurrences and repetition in conversation with Merve @mertufan

-ool- gathers- #6

Sat, April 1 at FICA Reading Room

Listening Session:
If you don’t hear the six-legged dog, will it matter?
By Merve Espina

Merv Espina @junglekaraoke is an artist and researcher with a keen interest in spelunking through historical lapses and institutional oversights, often without a flashlight. Producing projects self-reflexively, individually and collectively, he usually works with radio, music, and sound as space, phenomena, material, and intangible cultural archive. He was artist-in-residence at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR, January-April 2023. In this session, Merv jockeyed through a set of unpopular mixes, jagged streams, platform soundscapes, radio experiments, tuning systems and not-quite-field recordings.