Event

Join us at Public Trust for From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, a film screening on Thursday, November 14, 2024 from 6:00-8:00pm that follows trade journeys between western India, eastern Africa and the Persian/Arabian gulf across a sea of piracy and sanctions. The event will also feature a public conversation with artists Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran of the collaborative studio CAMP. Presented with the Department of Cinema & Media Studies and the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. A reception will follow.

"A travelogue with sailors who make boats, sail boats, and on long days and nights between work and rest, also make videos, sometimes with songs married to them. [...] This then is the view from the other boat."
— CAMP

The feature-length film From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf is the result of four years of friendship, encounter and media exchanges between a group of sailors from the Western Indian Ocean, and the Mumbai-based artist group CAMP. It is inspired by a particular video form from the early 21st century—filmed at sea on mobile phones, often with one boat filming another, then adding a soundtrack by striping a song from the phone’s playlist—and by the boats themselves: giant wooden vessels built in muddy “laps” in the estuarine towns of littoral Gujarat. The film travels between the Gulfs of Kutch in Western India, the Khaleej or the Persian Gulf, the Gulf between Aden and Berbera on the northern Somali coast, and back. It follows the movements of break-bulk cargo—from milk powder to perfume to petrol pumps—via these giant wooden ships and their sailors, and other aspects of a “Country of the Sea” through cinematic repositionings of the observer, ethnographic subject, camera, audio, and the boat as both carrier and medium.

The film is part of a decade-long engagement of CAMP with this maritime world, starting with a book of ship manifests from 2008-2009 (reprinted in 2022 and available online) accompanied by radio transmissions, being invited and then uninvited to exhibitions, and the exhibition Country of the Sea, among other happenings.  Since its premiere run of two-month-long daily screenings at an outdoor creekside purpose-built cinema in Sharjah in 2013, From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf has had a long exhibition and screening history.  These include festivals such as the Viennale, FID Marseille, BFI london, Underdox Munich, Migrating Forms NY, and the Images Festival Toronto (where it was the opening film).  It has also been featured at art events including the Biennales of Sharjah, Shanghai and Lahore, Documenta 14 Athens, the Flaherty Seminar and MoMA NYC, the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum Mumbai, where it received a two-month run, and at museums such as M+ Hong Kong and the Tate Modern, London, among other venues.