After Media Promises Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin 25 November – 27 February
While being interviewed for American television in 1982, Nam June Paik offiered a characteristically unconventional idea: if you make “a big television set, can become very profound”, and “you can stop and think”, he said, as one of his installations glowed behind him. That intriguing notion may or may not have been sincere, but it came to mind while viewing the video centrepiece of this exhilarating show, presented by the Mumbai-based media group ffff as a result of winning the 2020 Nam June Paik Art Center Prize. In its central work, footage from some two dozen of ffff’s multifarious projects – endeavours that tend to unite technologies with disparate collaborators, to examine metropolises, trade, corruption and surveillance with a gimlet eye – are projected onto eight gargantuan screens set at slight angles, like panels of a folding screen. The production is largescale and yet intimate, inviting you to imagine a better world, where citizens hijack digital tools to play, connect and hold power to account. A dash of the early internet’s optimism is present.
ffff, founded by Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran and Sanjay Bhangar in 2007
(but now comprising seven members), billed this audiovisual feast as a ‘moving panorama’, reconceiving that nineteenth-century-landscapepainting format as a twenty-first-century platform for surveying the expanse of their diffiuse practice, which ranges from videoworks to software development. In snippets of Khirkeeyaan (2006) women in Delhi speak to each other via closed-circuit cameras, microphones and televisions set up by
ffff: monitoring equipment being used to communicate. Another video details the basic workings of Pad.ma, an online program for archiving and annotating videos. And in one more, titled Capital Circus (2008), people who signed legal releases wander in and around a shopping centre in Manchester, England, on a rainy day, their movements tracked by 206 eyes commandeered by the group. It is a sly explication of a Big Brother state that looks comically prescient now that many
unthinkingly carry tracking devices with them at all times.
The works come one after another, and the pace is so fast, with so much action on the screens, that it is often not quite possible to keep up with brief texts that explicate the footage. (Luckily, a dedicated microsite for the show provides this background information.) Regardless, what unfolds is an intricate vision of contemporary working life in an era of high capitalism, assembled through lucid images: cargo containers being moved at a Guangzhou port, boats at sea, a presentation about real estate during an event hosted by ffffff on the rooftop of their Mumbai workspace. One mesmerising chapter was shot last year via a ffffffffi camera installed on the 35th floor of a building in that city. It pans around the area, taking in soaring highrises, crowded makeshift structures and a sprawl of green grass, where a man talks on a cellphone, perhaps (given the context) directing flows of capital or even the movement of container ships. (A rollicking protest song by the late activist Vilas Ghogre and the group Avahan Natya Manch accompanies the deadpan images. “What sort of rule is this?” it goes at one point. “This is the rule of liars!”)
As the panorama rolls along, two signature ffffff moves become apparent. One is to initiate (or isolate) a situation and then watch, very closely, as things transpire, an approach marrying John Cagean indeterminacy with an ethical commitment to bear witness. Another is to crack open some old tool for new uses, and see how people perceive their surroundings afresh as a result.
For the art centre, ffffff loaded about 175 videos of Paik into Pad.ma, potentially aiding future research and uncorking little-known gems (like the Paik quotation above). They also a¢xed a camera to a building in a fast-developing area of Seoul, and set it to shift its gaze repeatedly over one choreographed hour. (The feed is broadcast online and in a gallery in the museum.) Twenty-four times a day, it alights on the same spots: N Seoul Tower, a patch of gra¢ti, tall apartment buildings, a vacant lot, a security camera. Depending on the hour, you might catch people buzzing about on the street, a magpie landing in a tree or a garbage pickup underway. It just keeps coming. It’s delirious, a tangle of sights that journalists, historians and city planners could spend lifetimes investigating. It seems to ask: how can we improve a city? And before that, how well can we actually even know it? One night, tuning in from my own apartment, about three kilometres away from that camera, static suddenly engulfed my screen. It was hard to make out anything. Then I glanced outside. It had started to snow. Andrew Russeth