From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf

We are thrilled to make From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf (2013), a landmark work by the collaborative artists’ studio CAMP, available to screen online. The work is also on view in the current MoMA exhibition Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP. From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf pictures the labor, friendships, and pastimes of a group of sailors who regularly cross the Western Indian Ocean on handmade wooden boats, transporting everything from hospital equipment to television sets. Beginning in the late 2000s, as the sailors traversed the seas between the Gulf of Kutch, the Persian Gulf, and the Gulf of Aden, they used cell phone cameras—then becoming increasingly commonplace—to record themselves and their surroundings. A unique form of “video ephemera” emerged: single-take videos of varying resolution, which the sailors overlaid with music tracks and shared with crewmates and passing boats using Bluetooth.

CAMP worked with these sailors over four years to assemble this and other material into a film, structured as an account of one season at sea. The result is a rarely seen collective portrait of a maritime culture unbound by state borders. Mapping ancient trade routes using widely available contemporary networking technologies, the film also provides an alternative, sometimes intimate view of a region typically understood through reporting on piracy, smuggling, and political unrest.

The work has previously been featured in gallery environments and in cinemas alike, encompassing a wide range of viewing situations.

About the artists
A collaborative artists’ studio based in Mumbai, India, CAMP mobilizes widely available technologies, including CCTV cameras, cell phones, and the internet, to create new forms of cinema, community, agency, and art. Founded in 2007 by Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran, and Sanjay Bhangar, the group has a rotating, transdisciplinary roster of members. CAMP’s name has no fixed meaning—it has variously stood for Critical Art and Missing Philosophies, Confidence After Material Practices, and Culture According to Magical People, among other “backronyms”—reflecting the group’s open-ended conceptual approach and its humorous take on naming an organization in a time when development NGOs were proliferating across India. In the artists’ words: “We try to move beyond binaries of art vs. non-art, commodity markets vs. ‘free culture,’ and individual vs. institutional will to think and to build what is possible, equitable, and interesting for the future.”

From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf Credits:

Directors: Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran
Cameras: Siddik Umar Sanghar, Mrinal Desai, Junas Salemamad Bhagad, Ashok Sukumaran, Shaina Anand, Sulaiman Haroon Raja urf Dada, Jabbar Hassan Chingda, Ismail Haroon Ghandhar, Mohammed Rafik, Sulaiman Wahab Sumbhania, Abdul Majid Chauhan, Mehboob Abbas Sanghar, Hakimuddin Lilyawala, and the anonymous creators of music videos across many boats and seas.
Editor: Sreya Chatterje

Video After Video: The Critical Media of CAMP is on view at MoMA through July 20, 2025.