Promised Land Installation
Imran Channa / NL, 2022
What is the relationship between colonial images of landscapes and video game environments? How can images represent instruments of dominance? Promised Land allows the visitor to navigate through deserted landscapes which Imran Channa meticulously designed and drew from Eye’s collection of former Dutch East Indies films. Entry is free.
Channa’s Promised Land is a video game which acts as a film. Without a specific task or storyline, the film is developed when the player interacts with it, creating its narrative through navigation.
With this work, Channa tests the limits and different imaginations produced by the archive. He is concerned by the possibility of creating future conditions for archival material, especially within the time and discourse of the “digital dark age”.
His approach to this project is to create a super-utopian land based on the limited information from the archival material. A landscape that acts as a metaphor for different ideological purposes, which is both beautiful and alienating.
Imran Channa developed this installation during his tenure as Eye Artist-in-Residence 2021/2022.
About Imran Channa
Channa is a Pakistani visual artist living and working in Pakistan and the Netherlands. Channa works with different art media (installation, drawing, painting, digital, moving image and sculpture). He draws attention to the ingredients required for the process of documentation, highlighting how history is recorded, framed and manufactured via photography, archaeology and literature. Channa is interested in the role played by these modes in the perversion of knowledge and the construction of consciousness.
The Eye Artist and Scholar-in-Residence programme is sponsored by Ladies Eye and FC Waterboys. Special thanks to Sony and Mondriaan Fund.
From 5 - 11 September
Details
Director
Imran Channa
Production year
2022
Country
NL
Eye on Art evening
On 7 September, Eye's Artist in Residence Imran Channa presents the works he created using Eye's collection. The programme includes the screening of Channa's feature-length film Allegory of Cave Men, an introduction by Lex ter Braak and a conversation moderated by Eye's senior curator Mark Paul Meyer.
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