Shambhavi Kaul: Lunar State

About

Shambhavi Kaul is an experimental filmmaker whose films, intentionally, resist easy description. Her work conjures fictive non-places—sites which may nevertheless momentarily reflect or glance at what is moored and recognizable. Here, there, everywhere, nowhere, somewhere. Temporality is similarly challenged. Time is not a clock, a calendar, obstinately directional; it recirculates, twists back upon itself, as in a dream or montage that is both bounded in the specific and yet reaches to the unbounded and non-specific limits of the incoherent. The quotidian may be set afloat, the imaginary might be re-imagined as the ordinary. Kaul’s work attempts to show, by questioning, both, what filmmaking is capable of and what viewers can receive from the moving image, these ineffable cartographies of displacement and mutability: it is a body of work which creates its own ontology.

'Lunar State', at Jhaveri Contemporary, is Kaul’s first solo show. The exhibition presents three short films—Night Noon, Mount Song, Scene 32—made between 2009 and 2014 in conjunction with Planet, a digital prints series. Depictions, literally, of all that might defy literal depiction, these works are a testament to the artist’s unique sensibility and also to the ceaselessly explorative tradition of avant garde cinema.