Synopsis
This video piece ‘More Joy, More Love, More Mortgage’ is made with royalty free stock footage from various websites such as shutterstock.com and stock.adobe.com. The song is sung by an application, melobytes, that converts text into music. This video is a meditation on the kind of stock dreams of happiness the real estate market sells everyday.
a video by Chinar Shah, Leslie Johnson and Smriti Mehra
Bios
Chinar Shah
Chinar Shah is a visual artist based in Bangalore, India.
She currently teaches at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Tech- nology, Bangalore, where she is a coordinator for photography discipline. She is one of the editors of Photography in India, From Archives to Contemporary Practice, published by Bloomsbury, UK, 2018. She also runs a home gallery called Home Sweet Home that uses various domestic spaces as a way to make and show work. Her work ‘Silenced Ruptures’ (2012) on the Gujarat riots has been part of a travelling memorial exhibition around India. Her work ‘Aravanis’ (2015) was shown at the Tate Liverpool and subsequently at festivals worldwide including the Birmingham Photo Festival and Art Bengaluru. She has been a recipient of many grants and artists exchange programmes – the most recent being the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation grant in collaboration with the Mumbai Art Room. She did her PGDP/MFA in Photog- raphy from National Institute of Design, India/UCA Farnham, UK and MA in Literature from English and Foreign Languages University, India.
Leslie Johnson
Swedish-American artist and pedagog active in Sweden since 1989. Professor with Valand Academy in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Lived in Bangalore India 2015-16. With humor as a tool she examines the phenomena of everyday life from the insignificant to the overvalued and the structures that influence or cause things to be insignificant or overvalued. She experiments with ideas by engaging with materials; working with traditional art medias and techniques as well as the DIY of living in the countryside. She engages in work in the public space with diverse strategies, from commissioned work to self organized experiments. Her projects often develop over long periods of time. A cast iron piece actually becomes the souvenir of a garden installation which is in a cycle of disintegration and revival.
Her work has been shown in Sweden, India, Russia, Georgia, Argentina, USA and others. In Bangalore she began to work with several artists experimenting with the presentation of video on the street and in unused commercial real estate which led to the current collaboration with Mehra and Shah.
Smriti Mehra
Smriti Mehra is an artist from Bangalore, India. She earned her MFA in Media Art from NSCAD University at Halifax in Canada with a scholarship from the AAUW Educational Foundation. She was an artist-in-residence at the Centre for Experimental Media Art and taught at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology where she studied as an undergraduate.
Interacting with Bangalore’s ever-changing, ever-growing resi- dents with their multi- lingual, cultural, economic backgrounds she has had to become a mapmaker of sorts. Mapping the desires, hopes, needs, dreams and disparities of this city from her particular vantage point has been born out of a desire to establish reference points for her own personal memories.
Allowing herself the title of mapmaker mediates the territories of art and design disciplines that have surrounded her. She has a strong interest in seeing her practice not merely portraying the human condition but being involved with it, harkening back to the mapmakers as actively exploring various terrains and substrates. She is both a purveyor of information, and storyteller and like the mapmaker challenged by taking the mundane and everyday, and unravelling and reassembling these details into visible intricacies.
Here work has been shown in widely internationally.
