11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

NOTE 1 This text has been developed in discussion and correspondence with the artists. ESTABLISHED2007, MUMBAI, INDIA LIVE+WORK INMUMBAI CAMP culmination of this longstanding engagement in CCTV phenomena — testing and breaching the medium’s limits while creating a new way to examine the social and structural hierarchies and categories of CAMP’s home city. ‘Ultimately’, says CAMP, ‘it is about cinema’. 1 Filmed using a remote-controlled pan-tilt- zoom (PTZ) CCTV camera mounted at a single-point location on the 35th floor of a building in South Central Mumbai, Bombay Tilts Down is choreographed as ‘a landscape movie in facets’. The viewpoints that occupy each screen begin with images at distant horizons and out at sea. A lighthouse flashes on screen, beyond the southernmost tip of the city at dawn, 15 kilometres from where it’s being filmed, and slowly pans closer toward In the quiet neighbourhood of Chuim Village, Mumbai, CAMP’s studio acts as a centre of social and artistic activity. The group of artists have had a focused interest in closed-circuit television (CCTV) and video imaging since the early 2000s, understanding the medium and its technological evolution; investigating its social and authoritative implications by entering control rooms with members of the public; and deploying surveillance cameras as an affective medium to create new forms of documentary film. Bombay Tilts Down 2022 is a the working-class neighbourhoods Parel and Worli, in the heartland of the island city. Each of the screen’s ‘single takes’ begin to zero in on particular buildings — almost like the scene of a crime has been detected — before beginning to tilt downwards. The first tilt-down is from ‘Palais Royale’, the tallest building in Mumbai, whose top 20 floors are illegal and whose footprint, like others, rests on an old mill compound. Another tilt-down is from ‘Samudra Mahal’, once the palace of a maharaja and now a sea‑facing highrise, home to some of India’s most notorious white‑collar criminals. Soon all the views are tilting as viewers, in the words of CAMP, ‘descend into the ordinary’. From the beginning of Bombay Tilts Down , the CCTV medium is pushed to its extremes: taken up 36 floors and thrown off, pulling into focus a distant perspective beyond its conventional frame; and CAMP hack its software to control and modify the camera’s default patrol functions. Time is folded into the layers of images as the ‘takes’ are repeated over and over again. In some cases, we see time- lapse video spanning a day, when a storm rolls over the city, and some months’ worth of footage might be incorporated in a single tilt-down. We see a building lose some floors on a construction site, a coastal road get deconstructed and a shanty receive a new roof. Multiple narratives unfurl, revealing, as CAMP says, ‘details without end’. As the views continue to fall we begin to notice people making eye contact with the camera. Some appear to be watching the livestream, controlling the shots. Everyone is an actor in this city of cinema and appears to control or have a say in its narrative. Rather than allowing audiences to passively watch the drama of this shifting vertical landscape, CAMP determines elements to see that suggest new subjects and object formation in the city. In doing so, Bombay Tilts Down becomes an affecting new thesis on Mumbai and its inhabitants, tracing and recoding the architectural, environmental and human lines and flows of the metropolis. The work becomes a moving commentary on architectural histories, cultural and environmental change, social status and authority, evocatively accompanied by two alternating scores by musician Tushar Adhav (BamBoy), who grew up in Parel, haunted by sirens and a previous generation of dead poets and balladeers. For CAMP, the series of journeys through the city, and the human interactions they set up, reveal it is still a place of people with their own heartbeat; of people who determine their own place in this landscape. It is still a place for cinema. TARUNNAGESH Bombay Tilts Down 2022 (installation view, Sassoon Docks, Mumbai, 2024) / Courtesy: The artists / Photograph: Abner Fernandez, Experimenter Gallery ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 70 — 71