Watch A Mash-Up of Movie Clips at Mumbai Art Room

Hollywood disaster films usually play out catastrophes on epic scales: sky scrapers collapse, cars blow up, tsunamis flatten the earth and earthquakes crater what’s left of it. String these isolated scenes together and what you have is a showreel of absolute silliness, as Australian artist Tracey Moffat and collaborator Gary Hillberg effectively demonstrate in their 10-minute video piece Doomed (2007) currently being screened at Mumbai Art Room. You’ll recognise some of the more iconic scenes—we spotted ones from Twister, Terminator, The Day After Tomorrow, The Mummy and Titanic among others—all of it soundtracked to a thumping, bass-heavy electro tune that beats to the adrenaline rush doubtlessly intended when you watch them in the cinema. Some scenes seem to suggest that these films feed off our fear of the grandness of nature, but really it’s the inane need of humans to destroy that really shines through (that, and the fact that most of these disasters usually only ever take place in the US). Also showing is Swiss-American artist and musician Christian Marclay’s Telephones (1995), another reel of spliced-together movie scenes, where actors like Whoopi Goldberg, Meg Ryan, Cary Grant, Clint Eastwood, Humphrey Bogart, Tom Hanks and others appear to be joined in a single sequence of dialing, answering, conversing and hanging up the phone. Confusion between the various characters ensue, but it’s the disjointedness of modern communication that resonates loudest of all.

Mumbai Art Room

LocationPipewala Building
Back Gate
Opposite Navy Children School
Fourth Pasta Lane
Colaba

Phone97699 50136

Relevant DatesUntil Friday, October 5

HoursFrom Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 7pm; Sunday and Monday, closed

Ticketing & Price InfoFree

Websitewww.mumbaiartroom.org