images of poverty
Mar 2004, Exxon-Mobil Explorations, NTU, Singapore Oct-Nov 2004, SENI, Singapore Art Museum Apr 2005, Leela-e-Elahi Festival, Gurgaon Aug 2005, Housing the Black Divine, Nature Morte, New Delhi Apr-Jun 2006, II Monographic Media Art Sample, Colombia & Latin America May 2010, Festival International de l'Image, Paris
From a location which views much of journalistic practise and influence as a manipulative and insistent masculinity, Home Street Home questions ideas of home and homelessness, whilst interrogating notions of person, location and observation in the complex mesh of truth, fantasy, fiction and media. It foregrounds the person in the image, in relation to the accompanying text, whilst teasing the viewer with a reconstructed semiotic, freshly located. An old ploy of captioned photojournalism! What do we mean when we speak of home? Who do we associate with ideas of homelessness? Where do seek to build our homes? And, how do we perceive 'development' when we have no space for home? Translations of the text throw up another set of dialogues between the power hierarchy amongst languages, and the viewer's level of skill in them. All this engages with and problematises, the power, precedence and practices of much of today's media.
Home Street Home has : * Photographs by Ashim Ghosh, India * Text in English by Charlene Rajendran, Singapore/Malaysia and * Music tweaked from Satie, France
To present a broader Asian cultural perspective, the text has been translated into Arabic, Bangla, Batak, Chinese, Hindi, Javanese, Malay, Tagalog, Tamil and Thai. In this avatar, Home Street Home was shown as a video installation on 3 monitors, at the Singapore Art Museum, Oct-Nov 2004, as part of Home Fronts, SENI. As a next phase, the text hopes to be translated into French, German, Italian and Hungarian.
Home Street Home has been/can be presented in various forms. 1) a print exhibition, with each image framed with the accompanying text in different languages. 2) a projected power point show or DVD monitors. 3) a combination of prints and video 4) with live voices reading translations of the English text, in different languages (as in The SK Project)
DVD/slide show duration : 06:21:09
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samples of HSH slides click on thumbnail to enlarge
samples of multilingual text plaques with images
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED images & text (C)Ashim Ghosh and Charlene Rajendran
evolving a representation of |