Arts & Culture |
Bringing down barriers by 'seeking assistance' |
|---|
Adanma Federick & Siddika Khalique |
A London-Based artist is making waves in the art world with his latest visual projects. Vishal Shah is particularly excited about his short film Seek Assistance which is now showing at an exhibition of several single screen video artists called Still In Motion at London's Leonard Street Gallery (www.tlsg.co.uk). Seek Assistance was also shown in the digital film shorts programme at the AV Festival-LifeLike, which toured Newcastle Gateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough in March this year.It also made an appearance at the International Media Festival in Yerevan in Armenia in August 2005 and The International Kunst Film Biennale in Koln in Germany in October 2005. |
Vishal, a graduate in Fine Art Printmaking from the Royal College of Art, has also worked on a number of other notable projects, including illustrations for author Jason Shelley's publication, the prose piece Grey Love (2003) which is an allegory of 9/11 and the poem The Romance (2005) which is about metroplitan urban living.Vishal was full of enthusiasm when we caught up with im to ask him more about his cutting edge projects in different media. |
| Seek Assistance is a dark piece where did you get the idea for it, and what inspires your pieces? |
The inspiration for Seek Assistance comes from a still split second moment when you enter your train ticket inside a ticket barrier, and suddenly the gates don't open, you walk into the closed barrier and the message on the side panel reads 'Seek Assistance'. It's that very moment which we've all experienced, when pressure builds, people behind you get frustrated you have no access and everyone around is moving but your not. Metropolitan living with it's dandelions and roses versus stingy nettles and thorns is the regular pulse for the artwork. |
| The music on Seek Assistance scared me but other than an eerie feeling, what do you think an audience can get from your work? |
Seek Assistance is a sonic experimental film; it has an emotional edge that hovers uncomfortably upon one's eyes and ears, yet myself and sound composer Adam Stansbie see and hear a beauty in the film that sits paradoxically. When the artwork is in front of an audience, the work sets up a series of questions and situations that are not the given. The art is thought provoking with abstract realism. The questions and situations set up in the artwork are consciously made to be different from that of the everyday. Sometimes the work can be familiar to the viewer, but surely then there's a reason why the work is made to be familiar. |
| Seek Assistance is a film short but it is so intricate, how long did it take to create? |
| The film took about two months to complete but over a period of one year. The intricacy was the most taxing in terms of the production time; achieving the right lighting, colouring and getting the edits to the right level of sophistication was most time consuming. However, I enjoyed every detail of the processes involved. |
