‘CAMP After Media Promises’ at Nam June Paik Art Center challenges conventional media art

The Nam June Paik Art Center is showcasing the exhibition “CAMP After Media Promises” by CAMP, a Mumbai-based collaborative studio, who explores various media technologies through research, infrastructural interventions and documentation.

Led by Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran and Sanjey Bhangar, CAMP was formed in 2007 as an artist collective but later transformed into a studio where ideas and energies gather and become interest and forms, aiming to redefine the categories of observer, subject, network, database and image. CAMP won the seventh Nam June Paik Art Center Prize in 2020.

The exhibition features “Moving Panorama” that consists of eight large-format screens playing videos that were filmed in different cities including Mumbai, Manchester, Jerusalem and Kabul. The 42-minute video art has seven video essays with different themes that are intertwined together: “City After Video,” “Electrify” “TV Politics,” “CCTV Social,” “Leaky Abstraction,” “Grey Boxes and the Sea” and “Returns.”

The artist collective attempted to use CCTV footage as art in the newly commissioned work titled “A Live Choreographed Camera" for the exhibition. The creation was triggered by the question: “What is a movie in this age where there are more cameras than people?”

Cameras have been set up on the rooftop of the Daerim Plaza in Euljiro, an old avenue located in central Seoul, capturing different aspects of the cityscape, and is also livestreamed at cctv.camp. CAMP controls the camera’s movements with computer software as if choreographing it. With the pan, tilt, zoom functions, the camera moves at various distances and speeds, delivering stories of the old neighborhood that is going through urban regeneration. 

The work was a collaboration with Seoul-based artists Choi Tae-yoon, Jeon You-jin, and Minki Hong of Seoul Express.

CAMP has shown their works in the global art scene including MoMA in New York, Tate Modern, Serpentine Galleries, HKW Berlin, Kassel documenta and Skulptur Projekte Munster in Germany as well as in the streets and markets of cities around the world.

Inaugurated in 2009, the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize is given to artists who challenge conventional art exploring transboundary art practices inheriting Paik’s creativity and experimental artistic attempts. The former awardees include American artist and geographer Trevor Paglen in 2018, UK-based artist collective Blast Theory in 2016, British interdisciplinary artist Haroon Mirza in 2014 and American interdisciplinary artist Doug Aitken in 2012.

The exhibition will run through Feb. 27 at the Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province. The Nam June Paik Art Center is the only art center in the world dedicated to Paik who pioneered the video art genre.

By Park Yuna (yunapark@heraldcorp.com)