2013 Residency Participants: Priyanka Chhabra
Priyanka:
Priyanka’s Work:
About Priyanka’s practice:
Studying film at a design institute allowed me to explore cinematic form along with developing a keen understanding of narrative traditions and traditional skills and crafts. My independent practice in film has grown to delicately balance itself in the interstices of the imagined and the real. Broadly put my work tries to understand and address the relationship between internal and external realities, almost always touching upon the tiny details within the landscape of the human mind. Till now most of my work in moving image has a tendency to come full circle, things always end where they begin. I also find it interesting to understand the experimental or the avant-garde, by locating the ‘experiment’ in the method rather than the outcome.
My student works have been screened at various national and international film festivals. In addition to making films I have also extended my design skills to working as a researcher, writer and designer for publications, social enterprises and non-profit organisations. I have been working on exploring the emotion of Shame, through an installation titled Shame was a place inside my heart. Currently based out of Delhi, I have finished my first independently produced experimental short titled A Summer Flu.
How Priyanka might use the residency:
At the moment I am working on a literary adaptation, a short project focused on psychologically exploring the emotion of shame and developing a short fiction around the season of rain. My process of creation always involves collecting intuitive reactions to the space and time I am part of, documenting them and then finding a language to recreate that experience. I would like to bring to the residency my process of working (which involves drawing, illustrating, writing and photography) and create something in reaction to how I experience the space.
However I also wish to work on deepening my method and understanding of the relationship between sound and image. I would like to explore the idea of time and duration in moving images with sound being the guiding form. Since the residency is situated in a remote rural setting, nature and its processes and elements would be a perfect place to begin this experiment. Understanding duration as an inherent capacity of change, I would like to find visual and aural analogies to these in the natural surroundings.
If possible trying to learn more about sound as an element in itself and in relation to moving images, I would like to focus some of my experiments with different ways of recording sound and juxtaposing that with images to evoke different emotions and experiences.
Being part of a group I would like to explore methods together, critically examining each others practice, collaborating and try to address questions about cinema, as well as culturally rooted practice in each one’s home country. The residency could be a space that helps each participant see more clearly the cultural influences in their image making, helping everyone to better understand the similarities and differences among each other.
