Reading a City:

»The Indian Defence is a video project by Katja Stucke and Oliver Sieber, commissioned and displayed at the Chennai Photo Biennale 2022 Edition III. The video captures Chennai, Tamil Nadu, through photographs and found images flipped by hand that speak to what constitutes a culture as well as the city’s positionality as a trading and manufacturing entity.

The video begins with a consideration of the historical and contemporary maps of Chennai, as well as images of the streets and intersections that constitute the city. In an almost comical setting of provenance, we see images of chess and snakes and ladders—drawing from a large civilisational history of Dravidian culture—positioned as having been invented and revitalised in the city.

The video shows several images with rows of shipping containers and the port bays of Chennai to denote it as an industrialised trading centre, where hardware manufacturing takes precedence. Over the course of the video, infrastructures such as roads, highways and lanes are cited as constitutive of the city. We are then introduced to the idea that people make the city, as the video acquaints us to cultural touchpoints including the Tamil film and music industry and growing subcultures, amongst other things. The Indian Defence challenges the claim of India as a superpower, juxtaposing industrial development with the labour forces, exploitation, waste economy, and the effect of the climate crisis on the city.

The artists themselves were unable to visit the Chennai Photo Biennale, hence they presented their work as found and collected images, many of them channelled through the Biennale team. How does one experience a city purely through images, and is that a complete iteration of the space? Or, more pervasively, can the image truly be representational? In tandem with these provocations, the narrator poses the question, “Who is in control of the images?”

The Indian Defence uses Chennai as a conduit for a larger conversation about representational quality and the experience of informational infrastructures that pervade our notions of any place. Through associations and juxtapositions, the work questions the very constitution of a video essay, and its ability to inform or manipulate the viewer. Much of the images in motion are of empty streets and spaces, which begs the question–where are the people?

Another prescient question the narrator asks in the video, “Where would we feel comfortable?”. The answer lies entirely with the viewer than within the city, as what is described, understood, and even felt as “comfort”, lies within the viewer’s socio-economic, caste, political and cultural identities. The lens turns to the viewer, making it a pervasive act as the question remains unresolved. The work challenges the incomplete vision presented by the found images, and is anchored by the narratorial comment, “Every image is the tip of the iceberg”.

While the images bring some life to the city, they also remain unaffected by the contextual interplay between the viewer and the living city with its own set of structures, cultures, and spaces. Ultimately, the question that remains with us is, “How is a city read?”

Indian Defense, 2021
another Mash-Up by
Katja Stuke & Oliver Sieber
One Channel Video, 5:23 min
Sound: Axel Ganz

The harbour of Chennai, a metropolis in the South East of India, is an important hub to the Asia-Pacific area, and play an important role in the global trade network. »The Indian Defense« juxtaposes images from the Northern part of Chennai and found material can also be read as a critical approach to photographic images, their relations to the global economy and the lack of own ›real photography.‹

The Indian Defense was comissioned by:
Chennai Biennale, Maps of Disquiet, 2021
exhibited at: Goethe-Institute Chennai with works by: Harun Farocki, Jane Jin Kaisen, Katja Stuke & Oliver Sieber, Lisa Rave, Mohini Chandra, Nico Joana Weber, Parvathi Nayar & Nayantara Nayar, Rohini Devasher, Rory Pilgrim, Ruth Patir, Vasudha Thozhur

Through their work “Indian Defense” (2021), visual artists Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber open a new chapter of their ongoing project “La cartographie dynamique” (“The dynamic cartography), which can be described as an associative map that brings to light relations between geographically dispersed places and sites. This new chapter leads to Chennai, a metropolis that had already interested them before they were invited to participate in CPB3, because of its position in the global trade network which forms a strong narrative in their cartography. Due to the pandemic and its restrictions of travel, Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber could not visit Chennai themselves but explored the city through different visual sources. Against this backdrop, the “Indian Defense” can also be read as a critical approach to photographic images and their relations to the global economy. (Kerstin Meinke)

Indian Defense, 2021
Virtual Maze
Katja Stuke & Oliver Sieber
(Mozilla Hubs, offline now)