Director: Paribartana Mohanty
Duration: 00:16:26; Aspect Ratio: 1.778:1; Hue: 35.204; Saturation: 0.091; Lightness: 0.191; Volume: 0.215; Cuts per Minute: 2.008
Summary: Act the Victim (Inder Salim)
Single channel video. Duration: 16 mins. 20 sec.
Courtesy: Artist and KNMA
Act the Victim is a performance cum public-auditions project, experimenting with the medium of performance art within the format of audition. It invites people to perform as victims. It interrogates positions and question around victimhood, crisis and rhetoric of guilt and blame game. The artist intends to accumulate images about victims/victimhood performed by individuals or collectives from different geographies and cultures, to build an archive of ‘enacted and mediated images’. The project started in 2012 as part of Sarai Reader: 09 The Exhibition, curated by Raqs Media Collective at Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon.
In this video performance artist Inder Salim collaborates with Paribartana Mohanty, and wittingly makes him a victim in his performative act. About the audition-action Paribartana says, "The Act ended with a huge argument between the invited-participating-performer (Inder Salim) and the ‘artist’ (Paribartana Mohanty). The heated discussion opens many layers of the idea of art as an event, process, personal, and public, oscillating between faith/trust, cure/catharsis, life/duration, limitations, time, place, rationality, intervention, accident and touching upon the nuances of exploitation, vengeance and victimhood. The act/audition unfolding amidst an audience existed for a brief duration, making them a witness and merging boundaries between life and art. It was a life changing moment for me as an artist."
Pad.ma requires JavaScript.
