Shambhavi Kaul videos
filmmaker in person
April 7

Thursday, April 7
7:30PM- 9:00PM

Studio 4A, CMB Buidling, Moody College of Communication
Austin, TX (map)
FREE

Shambhavi Kaul‘s cinematic constructions conjure uncanny, science-fictive non-places. Described as creating “zones of compression and dispersion,” her work utilizes strategies of montage and recirculation, inviting an affective response while simultaneously measuring our capacity to know what we encounter. She has exhibited her work worldwide at venues such as the Toronto International Film Festival, the Berlinale, The New York Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Edinburgh International Film Festival, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the 2014 Shanghai Biennale and recently, her first solo show with Jhaveri Contemporary, in Mumbai. Shambhavi Kaul was born in Jodhpur, India and currently lives in India and the United States.

Program:

Night Noon (2014)
Unmoving rock collapsed to ocean-geology’s “thrust and fold”-becomes the unlikely habitat for two actors’ shadowy encounters with sand, waves, night, desert, dread, calm, trepidation and escape.
“Shambhavi Kaul’s Night Noon sets up dialectical dread in Death Valley with a series of uncanny shots of eroded, geological formations and dunes that seemingly fold into night skies and shimmering waters. Beginning in Zabriskie Point, the film surreptitiously crosses over into Mexico, its creative geography never far from our cinematic memory.” – Andrea Picard

Mount Song (2013)
A current runs underneath. It creeps under the door, makes its way into the cracks, revealing, obfuscating or breaking as clouds in the sky. Mountain, cave, river, forest and trap door; martial gestures, reiterated, stripped and rendered. A storm blows through. A parrot comments from a flowering branch. Here, the surfaces of set-constructions are offered for our attachments.

21 Chitrakoot (2012)
A land, as ancient and ideal as nature, is called up through the chroma-key backdrops of one of the world’s most viewed mythological television series. Spectacular images spring forth from a glorious, more magical time. But, as nostalgia turns into melancholia, hostility is the inevitable result. There is no option but a war to destroy everything, after which trace impulses towards a narrative are the last surviving markers of the material past.

Scene 32 (2009)
Scene 32 maps the terrain that lies between a beloved place and the things that represent it. The salt fields of Central Kutch are examined through High Definition video and hand processed 16mm film to become another thing altogether: neither a specific location in India nor its representation, but a rebuilt world of precipices and gullies, untouchable textures and unfathomable scale.