Comrades After Missed Promises

CAMP’s projects straddle both art and politics, and frame spirited public interventions, finds KAELEN WILSON-GOLDIE.

CAMP. Exhibition view of Two Stages of Invention at Experimenter, Kolkata (23rd of September to the 19th of November 2011). IMAGE COURTESY EXPERIMENTER, KOLKATA.

Ask any of the three core members of CAMP to explain what CAMP is, what it does, where it exists, or how it has evolved over the four years since its founding, and the chances are you will get three radically different answers. All of them will be variations on the same set of general facts, but they will differ as stories, interpretations and arguments for or against specific ideas. Given the mix of skills, experiences and affinities among its members, this makes a certain kind of sense. Shaina Anand is an experimental filmmaker who is fiercely committed to keeping the documentary genre open to innovation, inquiry and debate. Ashok Sukumaran is an architect who makes videos and installations that play with technologies embedded in social space. Sanjay Bhangar is a writer, coder and selfprofessed Internet addict with an abiding interest in open source software and breaking down the hierarchies and inequities of existing communications networks to make them more functional and accessible to all. What is surprising about the diverging histories of CAMP so far, then, is how well they accommodate, complement and complicate one another.

CAMPing in the Sharjah Creek Customs archive during research for Wharfage. 2009.
PHOTOGRAPH BY SHAINA ANAND.

First, the name: It doesn’t mean anything, or it could mean a hundred thousand things. It is, in a hard part wasn’t the code, or the words – all of which hint at CAMP’s wider purpose – but the grammar holding everything together. Anand, Sukumaran and Bhangar, it should be noted, also carry ten different business cards between them, with ten further permutations of the name, such as ‘Culture According to My People’ and ‘Comrades After Missed Promises’. By virtue of being deliberate in their phrasing, the group gets located in the world of ongoing debates on the relationship between art and activism, addressing the legacy of old Left politics.