Guest: Gautam Valluri
’24
Lange Steenstraat 14
B-9000 Gent
Gautam Valluri
Lange Steenstraat 14
B-9000 Gent
Gautam Valluri is an artist working with film. His work explores the relationship between architectural spaces and personal histories through the materiality of celluloid. He is the recipient of Masters Degrees in Experimental Film from Kingston University London and Université Paris VIII.
His work has been exhibited at ICA London, L’Âge d’Or in Brussels, CCCB (Xcèntric) in Barcelona, European Media Arts Festival (EMAF), Festival des cinémas différents et expérimentaux de Paris (FCDEP), Fracto Berlin, Braquage in Paris (La Lumière Collective), Lightfield Film Festival in San Francisco, S8 Mostra de Cinema Periférico in A Coruña and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival in Hawick, among other international festivals and venues. He’s been a resident at Light Cone’s Atelier 105.
Gautam Valluri currently lives and works in Paris where he is a member of the artist-run film lab L’Abominable/Navire Argo. He will bring his own 16mm prints of the films.
“One of the most exciting new voices in analog cinema.” – Chicago Film Society
In collaboration with LUCA School of Arts Gent – Atelier Mixed Media
Gautam Valluri
Buried in Light
Somewhere in the forests of the subconscious, a sleepwalker journeys through the remains of a lost city. Here the people and animals have become part of the architecture, the finer details of which are revealed through the moving light of the sun. Echoes of a possible past are heard in all corners. This place is now a somnambular archaeological site, lost in the no man’s land between dream and memory.
Buried in Light © Gautam Valluri
Gautam Valluri
Midnight Orange
A film about unresolved crescendos, thwarted anticipations and unmanaged escalations told through architecture gone awry. Filmed in the tombs of the Paigah family in Hyderabad, India, noise and silence, flicker and stillness tell the tale of a tradition of architecturally outdoing your ancestors, even in death’s eternal sleep.
Midnight Orange © Gautam Valluri
Gautam Valluri
Durbaar
A mood board for the Deccan Sultanate of South India. A tapestry of images takes us through lavish chandeliers from the court of the Last Nizam of Hyderabad to the illuminated memoir of Babur, the founder of the Mughal Dynasty. A series of disappearing sonic crescendos flood underneath, remembering the fall of a former grandeur. This film is an ode to intricacy and majesty, through reverie and voyeurism.
Durbaar © Gautam Valluri
Gautam Valluri
ul-Umra
In 1887 the Hyderabadi Nobleman Viqar-ul-Umra commissioned a mosque to be built from his memory of the Moorish Mosques he saw on a voyage to Andalusia. This film is an attempt to remember ul-Umra’s mosque through movement and stillness, image and its absence.
ul-Umra © Gautam Valluri
Gautam Valluri
Night Scene Charminar
A sleepwalk through the nocturnal bazaars of Old Hyderabad.
Night Scene Charminar © Gautam Valluri
Gautam Valluri
The Noble Mansion
An exploration of the dissonance between English-speakers and illiterates in Indira Gandhi’s India through images printed in the now-defunct Illustrated Weekly of India, and echoes of the country’s first TV ads.
The Noble Mansion © Gautam Valluri
Durbaar © Gautam Valluri
Midnight Orange © Gautam Valluri