FILL : RELEASE Navjot's Videos

FILL : RELEASE

Navjot's activity in producing the two video works : Mumbai Meri Jaan (2004) and Lacuna in Testimony (2003), has been that of an artist and a resourceperson. The four-part and three-part works shown at different venues including Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai in November and have been traveling in Gujarat, have a finger- pointing at the parochial, right-wing ideologies that shun minorities. The finger is Novjot's; while the hands that have worked toward it are many.

For an artist who has been organizing people for the attainment of work(s) of art, these two videos seem an arrived effort. The (upto) 30-feet projections were technically almost flawless. What lets questions open is the artist's conceptual process that the work stands evidence to. Navjot's conceptual thrust has been vastly on sourcing of the images (still or moving, stocked or fresh) and relevant texts.
This sourcing process seems to have been preferred over formal conceptualization that guides and shapes the sourced data. For a viewer who does not cherish the importance of the sourcing process, the data looks incidental. The choice left, is to make the data communicate, loosing some aesthetic accent.

Yet, The four-part video work, Mumbai Meri Jaan (2004), can be read as a critical text pertaining the notions of belonging and uprootedness, innocence and street-smartness, shows the wicked ways of a megapolis to internalize its subaltern. There are many approaches open for a reader, and the best one is of a pre-bollywood Hindi film type narrative of a street urchin. For a reader aesthetically more informed, there are transitions of colour that make their own trajectories through the presented data.

The sourcing- data- presentation- formal choice paradigm becomes oblique in Lacuna in Testimony. The aesthetic- communicative values are trickier. Hierarchy of sourcing over formal choice is out and open, yet the visual treatment is subtle. Except for the end: the sea that embeds images from holocaust through Gujarat-2002 undergoes a colour transition from the natural tones to blood red.

What happens to the time spent with the two videos? While the journey through Mumbai's nitty-gritty is restless, the sea of violence is almost cathartic and abreactive. While the first fills images, the second releases them.

- abhijeet tamhane