Videoclub: DeNatured

A Kolkata was included in Both Sides Now 7: DeNatured, a programme of eight films by international artists presented by videoclub and Videotage across venues in the UK and Hong Kong during May and June 2022. The selection explored how artists are building virtual worlds and using them to think through environmental change, new social spaces, post-apocalyptic conditions, the virtual body, and the afterlife.

Within that context, A Kolkata sat alongside works that approached environment as something unstable and contested, moving between physical, digital, and imagined space. That made it a strong setting for May’s video, which rebuilds Kolkata through photogrammetry, remote collaboration, and fragmentary perception rather than direct access.

For May, the programme sharpened a question that runs through the wider practice: how images hold memory, distance, and partial knowledge at the same time. In A Kolkata, the city appears through other people’s routes and recordings, so place is reconstructed as something shared, incomplete, and felt through mediation rather than presence.

The programme screened at venues including Fabrica in Brighton on 26 May 2022 and Phoenix in Leicester on 16 June 2022, with additional presentations in Hong Kong.