The symposium brings together esteemed media practitioners who discuss their positions of resistance and question the present. Another Lens anticipates diverse presentations about how we may analyse regimes of image-making in an age of digital viewership. The three sessions outline key concerns around individual as well as collective engagement within visual culture – the immediacy of the image, circulation as a form of meaning-making, as well as the generation of the new ‘disobedient’ archives signal a dynamic sensorium of reception.

Co-chaired by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Rahaab Allana, the symposium draws upon the most recent volume in the series India in the 90s presented by Tulika Books (also titled Another Lens: Photography and the Emergence of Image Culture), to consider how there is a retrospective reconsideration of the past through the present. The diverse approaches of the speakers highlight their own sources of inspiration in rethinking cultural genealogies – forensic, polyphonic, evidentiary, revisionist, surreal and liminal. The symposium therefore considers how we reimagine our modernist ‘past’ while (re)inscribing our aesthetic ‘future’.

SCHEDULE

INTRODUCTION | 2.00–2.15 PM

PANEL 1 | UNSEEN ACTS | 2.15–3.45 PM

SPEAKERS: IFFAT FATIMA, SHEBA CHHACHHI, ISHAN TANKHA

MODERATOR: ASHISH RAJADHYAKSHA

PANEL 2 | MEDIATISED WORLDS | 3.45–5.00 PM

SPEAKERS: ABAN RAZA, SANJAY KAK, PRADEEP DALAL

MODERATOR: RAHAAB ALLANA

BREAK: 5.00–5.30 PM

CONVERSATION | IMAGING HISTORIES | 5.30–6.30 PM

SPEAKERS: RANJANA DAVE, RASHMI DEVI SAWHNEY AND SHUDDHABRATA SENGUPTA

(In conversation with Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Rahaab Allana)

ABOUT MODERATORS

Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a film historian, occasional art curator and author of the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (with Paul Willemen, 1994/1999), Indian Cinema from the Time of Celluolid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (2009) and John-Ghatak-Tarkovsky: Citizens, Filmmakers, Hackers (2023). He co-curated the ‘Bombay/Mumbai 1992-2001’ section (with Geeta Kapur) of Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis (2002), You Don’t Belong festival of film and video in four cities in China (2011), Memories of Cinema (IVth Guangzhou Triennial, 2011), and Tah-Satah: A Very Deep Surface: Mani Kaul & Ranbir Singh Kaleka: Between Film and Video at Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur (2017).

Rahaab Allana is Curator/Publisher at the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi. A Charles Wallace grant awardee and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society (UK), he was Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Visual Anthropology at University College, London. He is Founder of ASAP | art (Alternative South Asia Photography & Art), the region’s first app for presentation and discussion of contemporary visual cultural production. He was Guest Editor for the themed issue ‘Delhi: Looking Out/Looking In’, Aperture 243 (Summer 2021); Editor, Unframed: Discovering Image Practices in South Asia (HarperCollins Publishers India and Alkazi Foundation, 2023); Editor Another Lens: Photography and the Emergence of Image Culture (Tulika Books and West Heavens, 2024), two critical Readers on lens-based practices and meta-histories of the image. He is on the Arts and Culture Committee, Asia Society (India Chapter). He recently received the award: ‘Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters’ from the Government of France.

ABOUT SPEAKERS:

Iffat Fatima is an independent documentary filmmaker. Her recent film Khoon Diy Baarav (Blood Leaves its Trail, 2012) explores issues of violence and memory in Kashmir. Her films include, Lanka- The Other Side of War and Peace (2005), on the history of overlapping conflicts in Sri Lanka; The Kesar Saga (2000), on storytelling in Ladakh; In the Realm of the Visual (1998), on artist and designer, Dashrath Patel; Boojh Sakey to Boojh (1996), on the contemporary understanding of 13th-century Sufi, poet and scholar Amir Khusro. Her video installation, Ethnography of a European city: Conversations in Salzburg (2008–2010), questions some of the assumptions in the east versus west dichotomy.

Sheba Chhachhi’s lens based works investigate contemporary questions about gender, the body, the city, cultural memory and eco-philosophy, through intimate, sensorial encounters. Chhachhi began as an activist and photographer, documenting the women’s movement in India. By the 1990s, she moved to creating collaborative staged photographs, eventually turning to large multimedia installations. Her works retrieve marginal worlds: of women, mendicants, forgotten forms of labour, and often draw on pre-modern thought and visual histories, interweaving the mythic and the social. Chhachhi has exhibited widely in India, and internationally, her works are held in significant public and private collections, including MoMa, New York, Tate Modern, UK, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, National Gallery of Modern Art, India, amongst many others. She was awarded the Juror’s Prize for contemporary art in Asia by the Singapore Art Museum in 2011 and in 2018 the Thun Prize for Art & Ethics. She lives and works in New Delhi.

Ishan Tankha is an independent photographer based in New Delhi. In his work, he tries to show the extraordinary range of issues that beset a country as large and complex as India, from separatist movements in marginalized states to protests in the heart of the capital to the effects of climate change on remote villages. He is focused on how life is lived in the crosshairs of major events and a fraught national politics. His work has featured in several publications including Le Monde, The WSJ, The Guardian, The Caravan among others. Ishan was a founding member of Goa Photo, a public art photography festival in Goa and was the consultant photo editor for the book Witness – Kashmir 1986-2016, 9 Photographers (Yaarbal Books, 2017). He has been a staff photographer with leading Indian publications and was the photo editor at Tehelka from 2012-13. His work has been shown at exhibitions and collaborations at the, Kochi Biennale, Archive Nationales, Paris, the Berlinale 2019, Kathmandu Photo Festival, Japan Foundation and the Max Mueller, New Delhi among others.

Aban Raza held her first solo exhibition, Luggage, People and a little space, at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Bombay in 2020. In 2022, she had her second exhibition titled There is something tremendous about the blue sky, which attempted to raise fundamental questions about the life of ‘the large minorities’ and other ‘working majorities’ and the right to protest and exist. Her curatorial experience for SAHMAT includes: Celebrate. Illuminate. Rejuvenate. Defend the Constitution at 70 (2020), India is not lost (2021), Hum Sab Sahmat (2022) and Moments in Collapse (2024). She was awarded the 2024 Asia Arts Future Award by Asia Society, India. She lives and works in Delhi.

Sanjay Kak is an independent documentary filmmaker and writer whose work includes the films Red Ant Dream (2013), Jashn-e-Azadi (How we celebrate freedom, 2007), and Words on Water (2002). He is the editor of the anthology Until My Freedom Has Come – The New Intifada in Kashmir (Penguin India 2011, Haymarket Books USA 2013) and editor and publisher of the photobook, Witness – Kashmir 1986-2016, 9 Photographers which was published independently under the imprint of Yaarbal Books. At Yaarbal he has also edited and published Cups of nun chai (2020) by the artist Alana Hunt. A self-taught filmmaker, Sanjay writes occasional political commentary, and reviews books that he is engaged by. He has been active with the documentary cinema movement in India, and with the Cinema of Resistance project.

Pradeep Dalal is an artist and writer based between New York and Mumbai. His work has been shown at venues including Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, Oakville Galleries, Sala Diaz, Art Cake, EFA Project Space, Callicoon Fine Arts, and Murray Guy. His photographs have been featured in publications including Blind Spot, BOMB, Cabinet, Grey Room, Nueva Luz, and Rethinking Marxism. With Fia Backström, he co-authored Photography in the Sensorium (Dancing Foxes Press, 2021). His artist book Bhopal, MP was excerpted in Chandigarh is in India (The Shoestring Publisher, 2016). From 2015 to 2020, Dalal co-chaired the Photography Department in the MFA program at Bard College. He is the Director of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Ranjana Dave is an artist, writer and editor. In her work, she explores how people build relationships with other people, ideas, objects and ecologies – what makes us social beings. Her new book Body / Language (TAKE on Art, 2024) explores the relationship between language and the body in society. She edited the second volume in the India Since the 1990s series, Improvised Futures: Encountering the Body in Performance (Tulika Books and West Heavens, 2021). She has built projects within institutional contexts, co-founding Dance Dialogues in Mumbai, and through her work as programmes director at Gati Dance Forum and Bikaner House in New Delhi. She has an active pedagogic practice and has taught at Ambedkar University Delhi and Ashoka University.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta is an artist and curator with the Raqs Media Collective, Delhi. 

Invite Image (as presented in Another Lens): ‘The Sovereign Forest’, 2011-2023. Films, projections on handmade books, seeds, photographs. Installation view, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary-Augarten (TBA21-Augarten), Vienna, 23 November 2013-23 March 2014. Photograph: Stephan Wyckoff. Courtesy Amar Kanwar