This article appeared in the July 3, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Installation view of Bombay Tilts Down (CAMP, 2022). Photo by Jonathan Dorado. Copyright of The Museum of Modern Art.

Two years ago, Signals: How Video Transformed the World, an exhibition co-organized by Stuart Comer and Michelle Kuo at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, presented over 70 works drawn from the institution’s collection, making it the largest showcase for video art in MoMA’s history. Signals pointedly turned away from the modernist interest in video’s formal parameters. Instead, the wide-ranging exhibition reframed video as, per the supplementary catalog, “a means of politics and an agent of social change” that offers opportunities to disrupt the “networks of power within which we now live.” The catalog also features an interview with scholar Ravi Sundaram in which he discusses video art in the context of India in the 1980s and ’90s—a period in which low-cost, often highly portable video technologies flooded the domestic market, and artists quickly zoomed in on video as a social technology rather than one primarily centered on representations of recorded reality.

The work of CAMP, a Mumbai-based collaborative studio, emerges from that legacy. CAMP wasn’t part of Signals, but a new show at MoMA, Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP (running through July 20, and co-organized by Comer and guest curator Rattanamol Singh Johal), showcases three of the studio’s major works spanning the past 20 years. Across these works, CAMP acknowledges video as part of the infrastructure of contemporary life while also tactically intervening to recontextualize the ever-proliferating images being produced by media technologies. In the process, they offer generative ways of rethinking video and the digital image after the exhaustion of Euro-American modernist narratives that prioritized formal qualities above social, cultural, and political contexts.

CAMP’s strategies show up in the exhibit even before you enter the galleries, as a projected wall text cycles through nearly 100,000 possible expansions of the studio’s acronym; “Code And Magical Promises,” “Community Among My Publics,” and “Challenges After Media Power” were some of the more memorable ones I saw. This play with acronyms and naming possibilities (CAMP calls them “backronyms”) originated when the studio was co-founded in 2007 by filmmaker Shaina Anand, self-taught computer programmer Sanjay Bhangar, and artist-architect Ashok Sukumaran. In order to be eligible for grant funding, the group initially formalized themselves as “Critical Art and Media Practices,” but they refused to be contained by a singular name or brand. In a conversation with Comer and Johal for MoMA, CAMP members characterized this refusal as a wink at the proliferation of nongovernmental humanitarian organizations across India through the ’90s and 2000s. Bolstered by two decades of privatization and market liberalization, such organizations were often funded by various Western neoliberal powers as well as multinational corporations, and in the end worked mostly to shift material and infrastructural resources from public to private hands.

Video After Video is CAMP’s first major museum show in the U.S. and comprises three works, Khirkeeyaan (2006), From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf (2013), and Bombay Tilts Down (2022), each of which is dense with detail and rewards extended engagement. Across (respectively) monitor-based, single-channel, and seven-channel installations, these works provide insights into CAMP’s distinctive abilities to manipulate image streams to reveal often-concealed infrastructures of power. Khirkeeyaan, a play on the Hindi words khirkee (window) and yaan (vehicle), is set throughout the South Delhi neighborhoods of Khirkee, Khirkee Extension, and Hauz Rani. The work, supported by the Khoj International Artists’ Association and realized by CAMP’s Shaina Anand, comprises seven short films. In each, a four-way audiovisual communications network provisionally built using cable television equipment and emergent CCTV infrastructure enables local residents to interact in real time across residential homes, stores, streets, barbershops, and bodegas. Six of these videos loop on three monitors in the exhibition, while an accompanying wall diagram traces the makeshift and lo-fi physical organization of the networks.

Anticipating the Zoom era by 15 years, Khirkeeyaan explores possibilities for communal dialogue in the face of urban alienation and late-capitalist dispossession. The conversation topics across the six vignettes run the gamut from domestic concerns to shared anxieties about encroaching urban-development projects. The timing of this work matters: India’s mid-2000s explosion of surveillance and satellite communications was both a consequence of and a contributor to rapid economic liberalization, intensifying gentrification and an overall privatization of public space. In the face of these forces, CAMP reconfigures the topologies of surveillance infrastructure. One-way content delivery systems (CCTVs that surveil the masses and cable networks that broadcast to mass audiences) are disrupted, their circuits rewired into a provisional commons, opening up new possibilities for community and solidarity.

From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, installed as a single-channel work at MoMA and available to stream on the museum website, relocates CAMP’s interest in systems and infrastructures from the city to the oceans that sustain the nonstop—and apparently invisible—circulation of goods and cargo required by globalized capitalism. CAMP assembles footage from the Gulf of Kutch to the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Aden, encompassing multiple formats including VHS, high-definition video, and (most prominently) low-res video clips taken by sailors on mobile phones and circulated among themselves via Bluetooth and shared with the artists. Filmed between 2009 and 2013, the footage is edited down to a tight 83 minutes, providing an intimate and kaleidoscopic glimpse into the everyday lives, loves, and labor of the human beings who make possible the seemingly frictionless circulation of commodities worldwide. A certain techno-social anarchism emerges, as one image format unpredictably gives way to another very different format, and the resolution fluctuates between low and high. What endures is a singular portrait of human camaraderie as the sailors film mundane activities: catching and preparing fish for meals, playing cards, reenacting popular film scenes, or simply awaiting the next chore.

The close-up intimacy of Khirkeeyaan and the expansive scale of From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf collide in vertiginous fashion in the exhibition’s largest installation, Bombay Tilts Down. Six monumental screens, suspended from cables and hanging low to the ground, unfold like a broken panorama in the gallery space. Cumulatively, a 21st-century city symphony plays out on these screens over 13 minutes, comprising moving views of Mumbai filmed from a single CCTV camera mounted on the 35th floor of a high-rise building. CAMP operated the camera remotely during the COVID-19 lockdown, zooming, tilting, and panning from its fixed location to map the city cinematically over two months. This footage was edited so that each screen in the installation plays a single, apparently uninterrupted take, set to a riotous soundtrack sampling local weather events, Bollywood dialogues, Hindustani classical music, Dalit poetry, and protest rhetoric—all mixed into a dub-and-grime-heavy score by BamBoy (Tushar Adhav). Across the screens, the camera’s movements vary unpredictably, from languorous sweeps over the Indian Ocean and Mumbai’s rapidly transforming skyline to sharp focuses on blue tarp–covered slums, streets clogged with humans as much as with traffic, and—occasionally—city dwellers who seem to register the camera’s distant gaze and gesture in response.

Even though the piece literally hinges on a fixed point of view—riffing on Western linear perspective and its reproduction in panoptic surveillance infrastructures—its assemblage, sound design, and installation all contest the notion of a singular frame of reference. In a practical sense, it is impossible for spectators to take in all six screens from any one position. The soundtrack’s citation of leftist and Dalit artists like K.A. Abbas, Vilas Ghogre, and Narayan Surve (among others), as well as elements of the city caught in the CCTV’s gaze—such as the illegally built Palais Royale, a luxury high-rise that currently occupies the site of an old textile mill—cohere into a multifaceted portrait of a metropolis as it hurtles through crises of privatized postindustrial development, while also seeding instances of solidarity and resistance. As one hears Ghogre say, “our housing still remains a question.”

If, as Signals posited, our private and public worlds today are increasingly shaped by images, then the work of CAMP impishly suggests that these mediated worlds are just so many environments to be hacked, their smooth surfaces peeled back and their generative infrastructure rendered perceptible. CAMP achieves this not only through their engagement with visual media in urban contexts, but also by attending to the afterlives of digital media—as with their online, open-source, moving-image archives like Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma. Rather than condemn technology outright, CAMP seeks to hijack its raw materials, probing the internal logics of systems of surveillance and image production, and ultimately disrupting technologized inequities and control. In the end, their work rewires relations between what is permitted to be visible and what is purposely rendered invisible.

Swagato Chakravorty is associate curator at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, and a Ph.D. candidate in history of art combined with film and media studies at Yale University.