05.04. – 03.05
In collaboration with Tromsø Kunstforening, throughout the spring screened a selection of films from the Artists’ Film International network in our kiosk-kino in Havneterminal, Tromsø, around the theme Diaspora.
GROTESKKBASILISKK! MINERAL MIXTAPE
Mochu, 2022
26 mins (Selected by Project 88, Mumbai)
GROTESKKBASILISKK! MINERAL MIXTAPE indexes an anomalous crash site of philosophy where online subcultures, cyberpunk ruins and imperial nostalgia arrange themselves into a prismatic history full of memory errors, discognitions and techno-utopian fantasies. Glinting through this conceptual wreckage is a peculiar anti-egalitarian map of time, closely allied to the genre tactics of science fiction and horror, as well as the managerial protocols of big tech. Through a corruption of 3d real estate commercials, Bollywood sounds, mythological comics etc, the video looks at the strange historical complicity between technological fictions and anti-rationalist ideas on the internet.
Mochu (b. India, 1983) works with video and text arranged as installations, lectures and publications. Techno-scientific fictions feature prominently in his practice, often overlapping with instances or figures drawn from art history and philosophy. Recent projects have explored cyberpunk nostalgia, corporate horror, mad geologies, psychedelic subcultures and Indian modernist painting. He is the author of the books Bezoar Delinqxenz (Edith-Russ-Haus / Sternberg Press, 2023), and Nervous Fossils: Syndromes of the Synthetic Nether (Reliable Copy / KNMA, 2022).
His works have been exhibited at Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Home Works Forum, 9th Asia Pacific Triennial, Sharjah Biennial 13, 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale and transmediale: BWPWAP.
Artists’ Film International: Diaspora
Artists’ Film International is a partnership of 18 international art centres that celebrates moving-image. Every year, each organisation selects a film from an artist connected to their region, based on a collectively agreed theme.
Branching out from the theme of DIASPORA, the films selected explore the act of dispersal, in relation to people, geographies, information and networks.
Our final screening of AFI: Diaspora presents a work by Indian artist Mochu, focusing on how information networks and spreads, and where different forms of information – digital and analogue, cultural and personal – collide and shape overlapping cultures.
Artists’ Film International (AFI) is a partnership of 18 international organisations that celebrates moving image: Bag Factory, Johannesburg; Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, Texas, USA; Belgrade Culture Centre, Belgrade; Center for Contemporary Art Afghanistan (CCAA); Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; Fundacion Proa, Buenos Aires; GAMeC, Bergamo; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Istanbul Modern, Istanbul; MMAG Foundation, Amman; Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; NBK, Berlin; Para Site, Hong Kong; Project 88, Mumbai; Tromsø Kunstforening, Tromsø; Whitechapel Gallery, London