CAMP

Nam June Paik Art Center is pleased to announce that the jury has selected CAMP (Mumbai) as the winner of the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize 2020. CAMP is a collaborative studio founded in 2007 by Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran and Sanjay Bhangar. CAMP works with film, video, electronic media and public art forms, exploring various media technologies through research, infrastructural interventions, presentation, and documentation.

Zoe Butt, Artist Director of the Factory Contemporary Arts Center, Ho Chi Minh City, and a member of the nomination committee, explains that “CAMP is a site and nexus of rethinking strategies of survival with hands-on technological experimentation.” Her recommendation comes from her understanding that “their commitment to the idea of art as a social sphere of questioning, to which collaboration and exchange is crucial to the challenge of hegemony and its tools, is not only present in their methodologies of making, but also in their critical neighborliness which embraces openness to all forms of consciousness.”

Dieter Daniels, Professor of HGB Leipzig and the chairperson of the jury, was drawn to CAMP for their “process-oriented and open-ended” way as seen in Paik’s ideas such as Global Groove or Random Access Information. They “develop low-threshold participatory concepts in a wide range of ‘media’ such as electricity, transport and surveillance systems, archives, cinema, video, radio, and the internet.” He suggests that their “interventions in the public domain allow for open access,” mounting resistance against “the power of globalized capital.”

The NJP Art Center Director Kim Seong Eun, who served on the jury, accentuates CAMP’s “corporeal approach of getting into the thick of things and people in a time when words such as ‘participatory’ or ‘relational’ are losing momentum.” CAMP’s work, by “reconfiguring the concept of publicness and commons against the muscles of neoliberalism,” Kim adds, “is of particular import and relevance given the shifting horizons of network media culture in the face of the pandemic.” The jury members uniformly believe that with CAMP’s selection, Nam June Paik Art Center Prize has further crystalized the characteristics of its pedigree.