Rob Crosse | Postcard Views | 1 Shanti Road, Bangalore

Adam Chodzko, Settlement, 2004

Rob Crosse is showing his film The Speed of Change as part of the film screening programme Postcard Views at 1 Shanthi Road, Bangalore, India on Tuesday 24 November 2015 6:30pm.

POSTCARD VIEWS

Press Release

Bangalore is said to be both the 'new Silicon Valley' and a 'Garden City', yet is trying to come to terms with large areas of inner city wasteland.

German landscape architect GH Krumbiegel (1865-1956) went to London in 1888 in order to help design Hyde Park and the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, London. He subsequently settled in India at the beginning of the 20th century and designed major botanical gardens in Ooty and Bangalore after the model of British parks. A system of ‘park’ was thus transplanted to India and other countries, and landscape architecture became part of the British colonial programme.

The film programme ‘Postcard Views’ at 1 Shanthi Road gallery, Bangalore, takes this historic fact as the starting point and invites artists who explore landscape from the context of 'man-made' environments driven by regeneration processes, political spatial division and wasteland management. They map out situations where control and power seem to be firmly encoded within landscape and where parks and monuments seem to reveal or memorialise certain cultural values. Our human instinct to consistently reorganise nature and landscape according to cultural perspectives and political control is laid bare.

Allowing a dialogue between different geographical locations - India and Europe - the programme raises notions, still relevant today, concerning imperial gestures and globalisation, where colonial powers' seem to come along in disguise of rich investors. How do we interact with public space made available by the state or a colonial power structure? How do we become aware of these strategies of power? The artistic approach seems to help trace, reveal and re-evaluate those strategies within a landscape's or a city's layered residues.

- curated by Carmen Billows

Programme: Mike Marshall, Days like these, 2003, 3.24 mins., UK Johanna Domke, Stultifera Garden, 2008 11.35 mins., D Adam Chodzko, Settlement, 2004, 10 mins., UK Robert Crosse, The Speed of Change, 2015, 2.40 mins., UK Stephen Connolly, The Whale, 2005, 9.15 mins., UK Matthew Murdoch, Being There, 2006, 4.30 mins., UK Ann Donnelly, Political Landscape, 2007, 7 mins., IE Claudia Kapp, You lose, 2011, 4 mins., D Semiconductor, All the Time in the World, 2005, 4.42 mins., UK Michelle Deignan, Ways to Speculate, 2014, 4.20 mins., UK Genevieve Staines, Ruins in Reverse, 2005, 5.50 mins., AU Daniel Beerstecher, Mas Continua a Vida, 2014, 5.18 mins., D