INDIA WEEK
Iram Ghufran
(New Dehli, Indien)

»REHEARSAL FOR A FILM«

Eröffnung:
Mittwoch, 4. November 2015
20 Uhr

Öffnungszeiten:
5.– 8. November 2015
Do – So, 18 – 20 Uhr

India Week

Bio & exhibition note

IRAM GHUFRAN is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist based in New
Delhi (India). Her work lies at the interstices of research and
practice, and speaks to psychiatry, social anthropology, media
history and material culture.

As a member of the Media Lab at Sarai CSDS, New Delhi between 2004
-2011, Iram was part of several experimental and cross-disciplinary
processes and collaborations. She leads Sandarbh, a non-profit artists
initiative in rural Rajasthan, and co-curates Soundphiles, a selection
of experimental sound art for IAWRT’s Asian Women’s Film Festival.

Her work has been shown in multiple art and cinematic contexts
including Experimenta India, Berlin Film Festival, New York Indian
Film Festival and ISEA among others.

REHEARSAL FOR A FILM emerges from an ongoing artistic research
project in Yiwu City in south China. Yiwu is one of the largest
markets trading in small commodities across the global South, selling
more than 60% of the worlds Christmas decorations. It is a site where
technology, consumerism and adaptive market conditions coalescence to
produce a visual and tactile inventory of human needs and desires.

The city is a fragment of the global cosmos that reflects a highly
accelerated contemporaneity of our times. It offers an intriguing
vantage point to observe the world in all its ebbs and flows. Yiwu
reflects a generic human condition – one of a perpetual state of
arrival into the future. Everyday is a practice, a dress rehearsal, a
performance of living. It is a place to wonder at the human capacity
to give the non-living, attributes of the living – in cheap, plastic
measures. One could easily dispense with dichotomies of human and
machine, meat and metal, natural and plastic, real and fake, and take
up an almost schizophrenic position, where multiple functionalities,
identities, and materials inhabit a singular geography, and there is
no formulaic way of establishing what the ‘real’ is any more.

In a hypothetical future, a 5 inch flying fairy in blue and violet
plastic, being shipped in containers to Mombasa in 2015, might be a
propeller of the one-way flight to Mars in 2022. The two co-exist in
tandem and not in contrast with one another. Yiwu is a place to
imagine such futures of simultaneity.

Shot in small factory units making artificial flowers and toys, in
Futian wholesale market, and in night markets of the city, REHEARSAL
FOR A FILM constitutes video, photographs, text and object
installation.

The project has been supported by West Heavens, Shanghai.