ALEXANDER HAHN

electronic media artist

Video

INDIAN RECORDS

(2013, 32:00', HD, stereo)


A pivotal moment in my stay occurred on the day I was traveling by car from Delhi to Agra.

The road appeared to me like a carpet that unrolled in a constant process of amazing genesis. 

Dust, gunk and colors emerged from the fallow light 

and momentarily congealed as people, fauna, flora and commodities – 

instants of evanescent life, each beautiful and unique,

 all too quickly fading in the rear view mirror.



Indian Records is a compilation of video vignettes, singular acts amidst the everyday and nondescript, caught by happenstance during an artist residency in India from October 2012 to January 2013, originally published as part of a video blog http://indiecam.blogspot.com/

Captured on a variety of openly wielded and concealed cameras, the pieces reflect a deeply personal look at a society obsessed with recording and archiving everything. 


Cathie Payne examined the vignettes in Miniature and Series: The Re-invention of the Epistolary Form in the Work of Alexander Hahn, seeing them “as a documentary method to capture transient and ephemeral interactions as a particular conceptual and aesthetic strategy … that reinvent the epistolary form more commonly seen in the scientific field diary, sketchbook, journal and travelogue. “*


*In: Digital Media and Documentary: Antipodean Approaches, Springer Publishers, 2018