Screening & Discussion
April 11, 2013, 7pm
Artists Space presents a screening of Ashim Ahluwalia’s documentary John & Jane (2005), together with a conversation between artist Mario Pfeifer and Radhika Subramaniam, Director and Chief Curator of Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, The New School. The film follows the lives of six Indian laborers in Mumbai call centers, and their resulting dislocations of self-perception and cultural fantasy as an outsourced worker.
Focusing on issues of cross-cultural exchange amidst US/Indian economies of labor, Pfeifer and Subramaniam’s dialogue will examine globalized cultural identity, while taking as its point of departure Pfeifer’s recent publication project A Formal Film In Nine Episodes, Prologue and Epilogue – A Critical Reader (Spector Books, 2013). Following Pfeifer's eponymous multiple channel HD Video installation, 2010, the critical reader was produced entirely in the Greater Mumbai region with local printers and manufacturers, and explores through its content and formation the flexibility of labor and cultural identity in the neoliberal society.
Radhika Subramaniam is the Director and Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, The New School, and an assistant professor of art and design history and theory. Her research interests are in South Asian urban modernity and cultures of catastrophe. Her projects include Living Concrete/Carrot City (co-curated with Nevin Cohen, Fall 2010), Art in Odd Places: Sign (co-curated with Erin Donnelly, October 2009), and Abecedarium for Our Times (Apexart, 2008). Subramaniam was the founding and executive editor of the interdisciplinary art journal Connect: art.politics.theory.practice, published by Arts International.
Mario Pfeifer (born 1981, Dresden, Germany) graduated from Willem de Rooij's class at Städelschule Frankfurt am Main in 2008. Pfeifer was a Fulbright fellow at the California Institute of the Arts from 2008 - 2009. Further grants from Goethe-Institut and DAAD led him to Bangkok, Marrakech, Mumbai, London and New York. A first monograph was published by Sternberg Press in 2011 followed by publications with Fotohof edition / KOW and Spector Books in 2013. Pfeifer's works have been exhibited at MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Cultural Centre, Brugge; KW - Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Frankfurter Kunstverein; and Circa Projects, Sunderland, UK. His films screened at Anthology Film Archives, New York, REDCAT, Los Angeles; Moca Detroit; and Museum Ludwig Cologne.
Mario Pfeifer:
A Formal Film In Nine Episodes, Prologue and Epilogue – A Critical Reader
Contributors: Suprio Bhattacharjee, Kaushik Bhaumik, Amira Gad, Susanne Gaensheimer (ed.), Nikolaus Hirsch, Ranjit Hoskote, Shanay Jhaveri, Kurnal Rawat, Bernd Reiß (ed.), Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Anand Tharanay, Ragunath Vasudevan, Markus Weisbeck and Mario Pfeifer (ed.)
Form: Markus Weisbeck/Surface with Kurnal Rawat/Grandmother India Production Supervision: Ragunath Vasudevan, Anand Tharaney
Hindi and English, Spector Books, 2013
300 pages, hard cover w/ printed dust jacket
ISBN 978-3-940064-60-8
