Loss and Transience

Hong-gah Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, 12 March - 2 May 2021

Presented by VisionMix in collaboration with videoclub (UK), and Hong-gah Museum (Taiwan), Loss & Transience is a physical exhibition and set of online screenings and webinars. that reflect on environmental change, migration and states of transience through the work of 10 artists/ filmmakers based in India and internationally. 

With opportunities to engage in discussion with the artists, curators and guest speakers, these events are timed to be accessible online in Europe, India and Taiwan simultaneously. Online film screenings will be hosted by videoclub and Hong-gah Museum.

Gigi Scaria, Face to Face. Digital photo (2010)

This exhibition brings to the Hong-gah Museum the work of ten contemporary artists and filmmakers from India, including artists of Indian heritage based internationally.
The selected works are linked by their protagonists’ state of transience at key moments within the films; a transience, for example, that might be associated with being a migrant, or the more existential impermanence of losing one’s citizenship. Precariousness may be linked to living in a neighbourhood of the city that is socially excluded, or having to grapple with environmental catastrophes that have severed communities from a way of life that has been lost. The creative responses to these conditions, both by the filmmakers and by the people featured in their films, however, are open to contingency and are persistently moving towards regeneration and resistance. Their strategies, porous to the conditions that surround them, are adaptive in ways that would be difficult to generalise, but must 
be experienced in the works themselves. 

Although many of these films and video works were producedbefore the Covid-19 pandemic, they provide numerous insights into how the day-to-day realities that impinge are being catalysed to affect change, but also to reflect on the present.

During the exhibition, videoclub and VisionMix presented Online Events, including a screening programme of works by Ranbir Singh Kaleka, Gigi Scaria, Mochu, Avijit Mukul Kishore, and Ranu Mukherjee. This was watched by 1,800 people from 19 March to 27 March, 2021.

Loss and Transience

rashmi.sawhney@gmail.com