• Mon 06 05 2024 / 6:30 – 9 pm •
Cinema as Invocation

With MRIGANKA MADHUKAILLYA, STEPHEN ZEPKE

What does it mean to rethink cinema from an ontological perspective? It means acknowledging the different ontologies operating in cinema, and the very different functionalities they allow. Mriganka Madhukaillya’s work as an artist and theorist takes up this challenge, employing the beliefs and practices of indigenous cultures from Assam, the region of India where he comes from, to interrogate Western modes of cinematic production and the wider structures that enforce their dominance.

Mriganka will present his film Invocation (2015), which was commissioned by the British Museum to investigate the Vrindabani Vastra, an Assamese textile woven the seventeenth century depicting illustrations of Lord Krishna’s childhood in over 9 meters of length. Rather than investigating these images, the film acts as an invocation, calling the illustrations of Lord Krishna’s childhood on the textile into the present in order to propose an alternative, but nevertheless viable world. Invocation draws on the mythologies and ritual performance practices woven into the Vrindabani Vastra in order to utilize them in and against contemporary technologies, seeking to connect them to the affective methodologies of our cybernetic world. Two important aspects of the vision of the future offered by Vrindabani Vastra are social change based on inclusion and religious syncretism, and the central role of a participatory and experimental performance practice in invoking the holy. The Vrindabani Vastra was central to this happening: in the process of weaving, as a hanging piece in the holy space, and in the performances that activated it through dances and rituals, in which both participants and spectators could experience a reconfiguration of their social and religious lives.

In conversation with the philosopher Stephen Zepke, Mriganka will discuss about the ways in which the truths and dreams of indigenous ontologies can be invoked through contemporary cinema in order to reanimate, and redirect our bodies and minds, drawing also on Zepke’s own work on the sublime in contemporary art and cinema.

Mon 06 05 2024 | 6:30 - 9 pm | doors open 5:30 pm
GLASMOOG – Raum für Kunst & Diskurs | Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln
Filzengraben 2 | 50676 Köln
In English language
Free admission