Index of Debt

Index of Debt
Single Channel Projection with Sound
2008 (conceptualized during a residency at Gasworks, London and then exhibited at KHOJ Six Degrees of Separation curated by Pooja Sood and Analytical Engine at Bose Pacia Kolkata curated by Heidi Fichtner)

KEYWORDS
+ circuits of capital and scholarly production
+ the contingencies of cultural work
+ communities of practitioners
+ the fiction of scholarly “objectivity”?

Index of Debt tries to open up, albeit in a slightly tangential manner, questions around circuits of capital and conditions that enable artistic production. Is there a way to bypass questions of “pure” and “impure” money and engage with specific contexts that instantiate the globalised nature of contemporary cultural production? In thinking about ‘infrastructural enablement’ and conditions of production could one point to the parallels between contemporary art and academic scholarship?

In the video we encounter a set of unusual index cards - that wonderful pre-digital innovation in information management and a crucial ‘technology’ for the scholar/researcher. In this case, the colour and the surface graphics of these index cards mimic international currency notes. The texts printed on them are extracts from the Acknowledgment section culled from a wide range of recent, academic books in South Asian Studies. The choice of this particular academic (sub)-discipline is of course not co-incidental as the contemporary career of South Asian Studies, particularly in the international academic context raises important questions around the political implications of knowledge production, agency and representation. The video essentially consists in a slow paced viewing of these cards that allow the viewer to minutely scan them even as she takes in the surfeit of place and people names: points in the globalised network of institutions and academics.

The audio the plays along with this video is an assemblage of extracts from an extensive interview with Robert Loder and Alessio Antoniolli of Gasworks, London and Triangle Arts Trust. The interview focused on the institutional history of Triangle and the way Triangle has visualized its role in the context of facilitating artistic practice in non-western, non-metropolitan contexts. I conducted the interview during my 3 months residency at Gasworks. At one level, I read the interview as a starting point in thinking critically about institutional histories. And at another level, could it be possibly read as my own “Acknowledgment Section”?