On Thursday, November 7th, from 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM, Twelve Gates is honored to present a film screening of Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar, The Neighbour before the House, 2009-2011, by the Mumbai-based artist group CAMP. This will be followed by a conversation with CAMP founding members Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran.
Palestinian families in Jerusalem / Al Quds look out and speak from their homes using a CCTV camera in 2009. The film was made in 2011.
“The Neighbour before the House” is a series of video probes into the landscape of East Jerusalem. Eight Palestinian families living in Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan, Beit Hanina and the Old City use their TV screens to look out into their neighbourhood, via a CCTV camera mounted on the rooftops of their homes, "tripods made of stones". Instead of bearing witness in the usual way, these families control the cameras from their homes; inquisitiveness, jest, memory, desire and doubt pervades the project of watching. A voice finds an image, an image is probed beneath its surface, thoughts withdraw or rebound. In these specific times and places, camera movements and live commentary become ways in which Palestinian residents evaluate what can be seen, and speak about the nature of their distance from others.
CAMP (founded by Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran in 2007) is a Mumbai-based studio of people who are artists, architects, filmmakers, and technologists. They host long-running video archives Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, a rooftop cinema for the past 15 years, and make art that is possessed of an infrastructural imagination. Their works have been exhibited in museums, film festivals, and public spaces worldwide—including streets, markets, and neighbourhoods in Bangalore, San Jose, Dakar, Mexico City, Jerusalem, Kolkata, Kabul, Delhi, Ljubljana, Münster, and Bombay—as well as in the biennials of Shanghai, Sharjah, Gwangju, Taipei, Singapore, Liverpool, Chicago, Lahore, and Kochi-Muziris. Their artworks are part of the permanent collections of major museums globally. Recent shows include solos at Sharjah Art Foundation, (2022) Nam June Paik Art Center (2021), Argos Center for Art and Media, Brussels, and the De Appel Gallery, Amsterdam (2019) and performances at M+,HongKong (2023) and MoMA, New York (2023). In 2020 they were awarded the 7th Nam June Paik Centre Prize. CAMP were Forensic Architecture guest professors at Goldsmiths, London, for 2023-2024 and are visiting fellows at the Center for Experimental Ethnography at UPenn for 2024-2025.