Innovative Curatorial Projects – Paris / SingaporeAyisha Abraham
*1963, London, UK. Lives and works in Bangalore, India.
Ayisha Abraham received her BFA in Painting at the MS University, Baroda, India, in 1987. In 1991 she participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York City. In 1995 she completed her MFA at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She has had several solo exhibitions in New York and India, as well as being exhibited in numerous group shows. In September 2005 her film Straight 8 was screened at the Srishti exhibition at Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria. In 2005 she was an invited artist at the Khoj residency in Mumbai. Her short film One Way, was screened at the Directors Fortnight at Cannes, May 2007. She is a member of a Bangalore artists collective, BAR1 and works as a visual arts consultant at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore.
Straight 8 / India / 2005 / 17' / 4:3
Straight 8 is part of a vast project, by Ayisha Abraham, recounting the cultural history of amateur films in Bagalore and its surrounding region. The film relates to Tom Aguiar, an Anglo-Indian who worked in the telecommunications sector. Though Straight 8 is based on real life, with personal anecdotes and montages of private scenes, it's not a life story. Instead the film aims to capture the fragmented memory and imaginary realm of his projects. Constructing representations from already produced and imagined images: the readymade, the recycled, found footage or found objects, the parts of a culture inhabiting the private archives of memory, the project does not aim to capture the nostalgia inherit in the grainy images, instead it attempts to explore and describe non-professional creativity during a time when technology was still in its infancy; the result of which is a counter history of Indian cinema.