“Global?” 1 & “Global?” 2

2013 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

Part 1, 2012, 22 minutes 10; Part 2, 2013, 4 minutes 50

Yogesh Barve

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Global? 1 & 2 documents an annual event during which people of a particular religious group gather around Jejuri in Maharashtra, India. The six-day festival, from the first to sixth lunar day of the bright fortnight of the Hindu month of Margashirsha is celebrated to allow the meeting of the principle God (Khandoba) with other gods carried from different homes of the patrons who take them back at the end of the ceremony. It is a common belief by ancestral stories that the gods existed in this region. The process of worship is called Tali Bhamdara. During this ritual, the participants try to reach the metaphysical stage and state. The music, repetition and the colors hypnotize the viewer who actively attempts to understand and decipher the rite of escape. Cultural globalization, potential exchanges and experience remains suspended in this space. Hypnosis and the state of being possessed are paralleled with the contemporary virtual environments and the Internet. In using a traditional event of Indian tradition and crossing aesthetic codes of transfixion, belief and hypnotization, Barve raises questions of new forms of colonization.

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Yogesh Barve (b. 1989, Mumbai, India) is a contemporary multimodal artist based in Mumbai, India. Employing a range of artistic materials, including found objects and digital technologies including his mobile phone camera in his multimedia installations, his work examines social and cultural experiences of equality/inequality, the outsider/insider, and the uninvited/the invited. His videos act as spontaneous testimonies to his instinctive visual sense. A common thread crosses each of his works: the questioning of our cultural framework of thought. Opening new aesthetic points of view to deal with social phenomena, unlearning/learning, building/deconstructing and binary opposition to unlock all anchored stereotypes is central to Barve’s oeuvre. Seeking to democratize technology, its accessibility and its simplicity as an act of decolonization, the artist’s work is singularly at the forefront of divisive frontiers.

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Colors:

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• religion.n.02
• ceremony.n.01
• ritual.n.01
• colonization.n.01
• hypnosis.n.01
• metaphysical.s.02