Note on Shilpa Gupta's 'National Highway 1 -- Srinagar - Gulmarg'
In 'National Highway 1 -- Srinagar - Gulmarg' (2008), Shilpa Gupta makes us aware of the psychic pressure which is often encountered by visitors to an emergency state such as Kashmir, which has been debilitated by the forces of militarisation and surveillance since the late-1980s. What appears at first to simulate a road movie tracking a pristine pastoral landscape in a blur of speed and distance, turns into a nightmare of convulsions. Each time we spot a soldier on the screen, he spins absurdly like an out-of-control gun, and then we return to normality, only to experience the next soldier and the next jolt. This metronomic sighting of soldiers at regular intervals could be read as a testimony to 'seeing and time' (I am adapting Heidegger's 'being and time' here), an ocular metaphysics of duration and rupture that allows us to see deep into a situation.
-- Nancy Adajania