'Different Danny and other stories' by Amshu Chukki

Behind the cinematic image are invisible processes of divination – bodies and apparatus that converge to form contraptions for production. Several practices and objects associated with cinema are often identified using terminology only understood by those in the filmmaking fraternity.

This invisibility is both violence and possibility to those it envelopes. In Different Danny and Other Stories, Amshu these skills, devices, and conditions to conjure an atmosphere that complicates labor and its relationship to the architecture of cinema.

Here, props, stands, temporary sets and stretchable bodies enmesh with desire, demand, and danger to come to terms with the inevitability of adjustment and change. It either mimics or it challenges the natural – conditions such as temperature, season and light are either resisted or required, for example. 

Through film, installations, and paintings, Chukki delves into cinematic time through and with these ‘background’ protagonists. Nonlinear, ductile, and sometimes suspended: time is unraveled against its very source – the spectacular city.

-Mario DSouza