La revue des biennales d’Art contemporain – Numéro 3 – Biennale de Sydney
Publié le 06/05/2026
For nearly two decades, CAMP has dismantled filmmaking power structures. The studio’s co-founder, Shaina Anand, tells us about turning CCTV cameras into creative tools, reprogramming surveillance infrastructure as art, and redistributing control of the image.
In November 2007, artists Shaina Anand, Sanjay Bhangar and Ashok Sukumaran came together through a shared conviction: that creating differently was not just a preference, but an ethical necessity. Differently from the commercial art world, differently from documentary film tradition, and in a way that would challenge the growing integration of surveillance into daily life.
It was then they founded CAMP with a statement of intent that declared the group was “not an ‘artists collective’ but rather a studio, in which ideas and energies gather and become interests and forms.” It continued: “In this process we try to move beyond binaries of art vs. non-art, commodity markets vs. ‘free culture’, or individual vs. institutional will to think and to build what is possible, equitable and interesting for the future.” Remarkably, not one word has been changed since that statement was written and, through this consistent intention, CAMP has become one of the most compelling forces in contemporary art.
Nearly two decades later, I wind my way through Mumbai’s Chuim Village—arriving, after several wrong turns down charming gullies, at CAMP headquarters. Over the next two hours, and some delicious homemade cake, Anand talks me through the origin and evolution of a studio that has reshaped how we think about technology, authorship, filmmaking, and the image itself. To understand CAMP’s practice, one must first understand the critique of filmmaking that lies at its heart—and which predates the studio’s formation.
Anand had begun her career assisting Saeed Mirza, a significant figure in Indian cinema, with whom she travelled the length and breadth of the country in 1997—the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence. It was an experience that sharpened her relationship with the image. Even working alongside someone she deeply respected, she found herself questioning what she calls the “triangulation” of subject, author, and technology—or, as she also puts it, “the rock-paper-scissors game” that is filmmaking. Anand began to push past the dominant frameworks of the time. “There’s something wrong in the frame,” she concluded. The problem was structural; lodged in the relationship between the subject, the camera, and the circuits of distribution through which the resulting film would eventually travel. This led to a series of radical experiments.
In 2004, Anand was running a television channel inside a market in Bangalore, as part of an interim semester teaching art students—already understanding that the question of where and how images are circulated is inseparable from the question of why and how they are made. The mini-DV camera, she noticed, offered something film, or early video cameras never had: immediacy. “These cameras already had screens. I would tell students to flip that around as they filmed. The technology offered you an image as you captured it. You could also plug the camera directly into a television and watch back what you had just filmed—share it with the person you had just filmed.” For Anand, this was revelatory: collapsing the distance between subject and author in ways that opened up new possibilities.
Sukumaran, meanwhile, was working even further upstream—not with the creation of images, but with the infrastructure that made their production and distribution possible. If Anand was interrogating hot media, in McLuhan’s terms, Sukumaran was examining cold media: electricity itself. Who had captured it? Why wasn’t it open source? He built interventions on the streets of Mumbai: unexpected switches appeared, neighbourhood connections were rewired—quietly demanding that the circuits of energy be thought about differently. These weren’t simply provocations. They were prototypes for another way of living.
By 2007, this shared drive towards alternative models led to the formation of CAMP. At the time, the Indian gallery boom was in full swing. Spaces were getting larger, works were getting shinier, but nothing fundamental was changing. The group—who were not producing work that would “fit on an auntie’s wall”, as Anand wryly puts it, felt they had less and less in common with the commercial gallery circuit and needed to build infrastructure of a different kind.
By February 2008, CAMP had launched pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive), an online repository that acts as both an archive and open-source resource, housing footage that might not have made it off the cutting room floor in the time of celluloid. The logic was transformative. If a filmmaker shoots a hundred hours for a sixty-minute documentary, what happens to the ninety-nine hours that don’t make the final cut? These might not be failures. What if they prove to be more important than the film they were originally shot for? Pad.ma gave this material a home, built on open-source software, with time-based annotation tools that were genuinely ahead of their time—far ahead of what platforms like YouTube were offering then.
As the internet took hold, it became, for CAMP, a forest; a place “to hide, to organise, to build horizontally, and vertically, with friends”. They stayed—and continue to stay—resolutely away from social media, watching with a kind of melancholic clarity, as even the smartest people they knew surrendered their critical faculties to platforms whose dynamics seemed extractive and destructive. Rather than falling into passive pessimism, the group remained actively constructive. Pad.ma, and later indiacine.ma, a film archive launched in 2013, are lasting expressions of that action: open, annotated, relational, and designed to return as much as they took.
The impact has been remarkable. The software framework underpins Mosireen Collective’s Egypt revolution archive, Turkey’s Gezi Park Resistance archive, and a labour archive in London. Payal Kapadia’s celebrated film A Night of Knowing Nothing draws extensively on pad.ma’s footage. And within CAMP’s own studio, the archive forms the backbone of an extraordinary trilogy—a six-hour work drawing on more than two hundred films to tell the story of the housing question in their home city, Mumbai. Navigable as both film and scholarly resource, it’s structured so that pausing the film reveals archival sources, photographs, citations, and the documents behind the moving image—all housed and taken from pad.ma and indiancine.ma. This is a radical rethinking of what a film can be and do.
CAMP’s most visually spectacular and sustained line of inquiry grows directly from the same preoccupations that animate the archive—questions of who controls the image, who distributes it, and what happens when that power is redistributed.
It was a cheap CCTV camera, spotted first in beauty parlours and markets across Mumbai—even an abortion clinic—that would provide inspiration. This technology, although democratised by falling prices, was being used almost universally for surveillance and property protection. For CAMP, however, it held much more potential.
The first significant experiment came in 2006, during a residency at Khoj, Delhi. Anand set up CCTV cameras, connecting four female migrant workers in the city’s Khirkee neighbourhood, so they could all see themselves and each other simultaneously, through their home televisions. Having constructed this circuit, she stepped back. What remained was an equal access, unmediated conversation—entirely the participants’ own. Several such episodic interactions took place during Khirkeeyaan, in a mash-up of CCTV and Cable TV. The rock-paper-scissors game had been completely rearranged.
In 2008 came an invitation to work in Manchester. Here, through the project CCTV Social, CAMP did something audacious. Working with Manchester Metropolitan University, they opened up working CCTV environments to the public. Over a week, thirty-six people normally “enclosed” by these networks came into control rooms “to view, observe and monitor” what was taking place. The conversations that unfolded—between visitors and operators—became the work itself. They also became a kind of ‘clinic’, with public participants and security officers entering a “two-way therapy session”, where anxieties and understandings were shared.
Capital Circus—a film produced out of another part of the project that took place inside the Arndale Shopping Centre—saw over a hundred people claim their individual images through provisions in the data protection act. They also agreed to have CCTV operators focus their 250 cameras on them for five minutes, following their every move around the centre. Footage was edited live by officers at their consoles, using match continuity technology. It’s a brilliantly simple, quietly devastating idea that turned consent into true public art; a work made by the artists and the public together.
The approach took on different weight in 2009, when CAMP was invited by a Palestinian arts organisation to create a piece of work in East Jerusalem. The opportunity threw up some fundamental questions. Would they be another set of artists creating the same images as the many before them? How could they make work without giving authority to the Israeli state? How would they film without asking permission? The answer again came in the form of CCTV.
Eight Palestinian families were given joysticks to control Pan-Tilt-Zoom cameras positioned on the roofs of their homes, in some cases, homes they were illegally evicted from. The viewer couldn’t see their faces but, instead, would see what they saw and hear what they said. The result is the profoundly moving work Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar [The Neighbour Before the House], which not only allows the viewer to bear witness, but gives Palestinians agency to document and share the violence they suffer.
By 2017, when CAMP presented CCTV Landscape from Lower Parel at the Imax cinema inside Phoenix Mills, Mumbai, they had developed a signature approach that was both structurally rigorous and visually overwhelming. Phoenix was the first of the city’s mills to be converted into a mall and was the heart of a decades-long mill workers’ struggle. The work was a live performance, with three CAMP members narrating two hundred years of the city’s history while images were shared in real time, as the camera panned and tilted across sixteen kilometres of cityscape.
More recently, in 2022, the artists premiered a seven-channel work, Bombay Tilts Down, at the Kochi Muziris Biennale. It was later shown at MoMA as part of their survey Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP. Footage was shot from a single point on the roof of the Four Seasons Hotel, with the camera’s ‘patrol function’—the loop of presets through which CCTV systems cycle when unmanned—hacked and reprogrammed, turning what was a system of surveillance into a tool for creative filmmaking. Here, CAMP again plays with agency. After watching for some time, one notices people on the streets behaving differently: they begin to look back. Occasionally they react. Surveillance is returned: the viewer becomes viewed.
This idea reaches its most ambitious expression to date in CAMP’s latest work, Sydney Opera, presented on the occasion of the Biennale of Sydney. A CCTV camera was placed on the roof of the White Bay Power Station, one of the biennale’s central venues, and the location of CAMP’s installation. From that fixed perspective, the film unfolds in what feels like a single take of 106 minutes—feature-film length, unhurried and uncompromising. The camera shifts seamlessly between wide harbour landscapes and intimate encounters with Sydney’s infrastructure and inhabitants, through a choreography that is at once exquisite and disorienting. The viewer slips immediately into the role of voyeur—enthralled but at times uneasy—until people in the frame begin to speak directly to the camera. They are no longer being observed. They are addressing you.
Artists and construction workers, authors and activists, poets and performers, cinephiles and filmmakers; each brings what CAMP calls a “generative third memory” to the work—personal, ancestral, communal, political—, carried in the body and released into the landscape to create a quiet, overwhelmingly beautiful cinematic portrait of a city.
Anand consistently uses the word “cinema” when describing what CAMP does. Not video art, not art film, but cinema—in the full sense Badiou intended when he called it the “impure art”, the seventh art, the only one in which all the others can reside. It’s a distinction that carries real weight. The artists feed off a hundred years of film history, while refusing to be constrained by it. Their work is made with the rigour of structural filmmaking and the generosity of community media. It is screened at biennales, in Imax cinemas, on rooftops and online. It is open-sourced and sent back into the world.
What CAMP ask in all they do is simple: who gets to make an image, how does it travel, and what does it do when it arrives? In an age of twenty thousand CCTV cameras in Sydney alone, of live-streamed atrocities and ubiquitous self-documentation, of surveillance dressed up as security, those questions feel more urgent than ever.
At times Sydney Opera is eerie—particularly in the context of anxiety about AI and the rise of machines. It is also optimistic. The camera that watches is the same camera that has always watched, but here it has been turned towards solidarity rather than suspicion.
In the end one is left with the understanding that CAMP’s provocation is quiet but insistent: what if the true destiny of cinema were to make us secretly and intimately aware of—and better connected with—each other?
Bakul Patki
