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Offbeat
Saikat Surai
‘The Tremor’ is a video installation, which had been showcased at Chisel Crafts, Kolkata, featuring seven artists of Khoj Kolkata – the last in the series of nine successive exhibitions titled ‘Art Against Terrorism’. The series is a joint venture of nine Kolkata based galleries including the one mentioned above. Artist Saikat Surai gives a first person narrative on his video installation project, ‘The Tremor’
THE TREMOR
Experiencing ‘terrorist activities’ have always reached me vicariously – through the media, thereby appearing as a ‘media collage’ to me.
Primarily, the role of media is to broadcast the documentation and publish the expert’s opinions. Then again the media has its own commentary. This is regulated by politics – the politics of religion, the politics of caste and the politics of power. These politics lead to the packaging of the media. Every ‘issue’ is being packaged – One cannot ignore packaging now. The point is what is being packaged and how it is being packaged. As a consequence facts are being packaged every day.
In a situation like this when I think about anti terrorist activities I am frightened and frustrated by the fact that how the idea of terror has entered into our nerves and we got immune to it. It already has become so insignificant that we care the least to probe beyond the media construct, which is in a way a combo pack of fact and fiction.
I thought it would be better to select an independent fiction rather than some based on true stories or the ones they call as documentary (?). As per the consequence I took snippets from Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’, (in my opinion it is not only a good fiction dealing with terror but a unique film that provokes the discourse on terrorism) without disturbing the narrative line of the film along with news clips from Taj Mumbai massacre and that of 9/11 and arranged the collective media. Preferably I kept the narrative line of the film (The Birds) intact because it has a never-ending tendency. As to add some realistic colour and counteract the combo nature, I juxtapose the news clips, which vis-à-vis, underlines the questions raised in the film.
This 28 minute ‘media arrangement’ is again a stimulant that insists one to sit before the writing table and go through a couple of related publications (Civilization, Cannibals and Evil Cult Killers, Blood and Rage, Confronting Empire, The Iraq Study Group Report and Media Control) along with two sets of unpublished NSA US documents. This is how I planned it so as to have suggestions on the reading materials, its content and justification. The whole process thus invites one to a discourse on the much controversial issues of fact, fiction, media, public, fear and terror.
The construct that we have around the word ‘terror’ should be much in discourse to find a way through.
