on-the-emotional-logic-in-humans-in-the-loop

On the Emotional Logic in Humans in the Loop: In Conversation with Aranya Sahay

Koyna Tomar Feb 22, 2025

In the second part of this continuing conversation with Aranya Sahay, the writer and director of Humans in the Loop (2024) talks about the process behind writing the film's central characters and his decision to focus on interpersonal relationships. Sahay shares how his interactions with Adivasi communities, including storytellers and musicians, informed the film-making process and discusses the audience he has in mind while working on a film project.

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on-humans-in-the-loop
stories

On Humans in the Loop: In Conversation with Aranya Sahay

Koyna Tomar Feb 21, 2025

Humans in the Loop (2024) by Aranya Sahay tells the story of Nehma, an Oraon woman, who returns to her village in Jharkhand following the breakdown of her marriage with a non-Adivasi man, as she begins to make sense of her new life in a familiar place. To retain custody and raise her two children, Nehma takes an unusual job as a ‘data labeller’ at an Artificial Intelligence (AI) data centre.
on-all-we-imagine-as-light
stories

On All We Imagine as Light: Caste Hindu Endogamy and the Possibilities of Love

Ria De and Koonal Duggal Feb 18, 2025

Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (AWIAL) (2024) is about the lives of three migrant women nurses and the ways in which they form community and solidarity with each other in the backdrop of the city life of Mumbai. It engages the politics of love and caste endogamy and that of migrant labour, as well as who can be a state and city subject and who cannot.

chambre-666
stories

Chambre 666: Is Cinema About to Die, or Is It Already Dead?

Akash Sarraf Feb 15, 2025

The emergence of digital technologies in the 1980s pose existential questions for the ability of cinema to endure as an art form. It is this question that becomes the subject of Wim Wenders’ forty-five-minute-long documentary Chambre 666 (1982).

mental-health-and-neurodivergence-at-chennai-photo-biennale
events

Mental Health and Neurodivergence at Chennai Photo Biennale

Anoushka Antonnette Mathews Feb 13, 2025

At the fourth edition of the Chennai Photo Biennale, photographs become biographies, helping us reflect on mental health and neurodivergence and its connection to the process of image making.
seeking-hope
events

Seeking Hope: Resistance in 'Like Air, I’ll Rise'

Ankita Ghosh Feb 11, 2025

Like Air, I’ll Rise, Experimenter’s last exhibition at Ballygunge Place, takes its name from Maya Angelou’s much-quoted poem as an homage to the writer and activist’s role within the women’s rights movement.

community-building-at-the-chennai-photo-biennale
events

Community Building at the Chennai Photo Biennale

Upasana Das Feb 07, 2025

Photographers have often collectively worked with a creative community to develop their practice or worked with particular groups of people to facilitate their expression. This year, the Chennai Photo Biennale (CPB) highlights the works of photographers building a community and creating work from it.
noise-performance-and-protest
stories

Noise, Performance and Protest: On Poulomi Desai's Music Practice

Upasana Das Feb 04, 2025

Growing up, Poulomi Desai was surrounded by classical and folk music from India, especially considering the popularity of Ravi Shankar and The Beatles using the sitar in their songs or The Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black.” She became involved with post-punk and their political strain with bands like Crass, and then with a Sikh hip-hop group called Hustlers in the 1990s, for whom she designed record covers.
poulomi-desai
stories

Poulomi Desai: Race, Community and Image-Making

Upasana Das Feb 03, 2025

Poulomi Desai’s oeuvre moves between the performative and the visual—her first ‘artistic’ experience was at poetry readings, where she was taken by her politically engaged mother, where she did “rant-y” recitations inspired by punk. After moving from Hackney to Harrow—a hotbed of racist activities with the far-right group, the National Front, close to Harrow—she was on the lookout for community.

free-jazz
stories

Free Jazz: Soundtrack to a Coup d’État

Natasha Gasparian Feb 01, 2025

Director Johan Grimonprez’s historical documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (2024) exploits the political potential of rhythmic montage to reveal the nonlinear and dialectical movement of history and the various contingent forces that determined the path it actually took—genocide and a protracted civil war—over another it could have taken but did not—national liberation and socialism.

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myth-ritual-and-identity-at-the-chennai-photo-biennale
events

Myth, Ritual and Identity at the Chennai Photo Biennale

Kshiraja Jan 30, 2025

Through a rumination of the creative and photographic process, the fourth Chennai Photo Biennale (CPB) gives shape to narratives around the visual production of identity. Five featured artists seek to unravel the threads of cultural identity through themes of myth and ritual in their practice.
coastal-commons
stories

Coastal Commons: Fisherwomen’s Struggle for Dignity

Nithya K Jan 28, 2025

Porambokku, or the commons, refers to land and water bodies controlled by local communities, serving as vital resources for sustenance. In plain sight, any common—be it agricultural or coastal—may appear to represent the community’s shared space. However, a closer look reveals the intricate influence of socio-cultural factors like caste, religion, class and gender in negotiating the power dynamics that determine who truly controls and benefits from these spaces and who is able to access these spaces and share its resources.
bodies-and-landscapes-at-the-chennai-photo-biennale
events

Bodies and Landscapes at the Chennai Photo Biennale

Anoushka Antonnette Mathews Jan 25, 2025

At the Chennai Photo Biennale 2025, photographs become portals of possibilities as they blur the line between the subject and creator. Beyond asking “Why photograph”, we are led to the questions—“Who photographs?” and “who is photographed?”
land-development-and-change
albums

Land, Development and Change: Amit Machamasi’s Not The Same Anymore

Alfa M Shakya Jan 23, 2025

Not The Same Anymore (2023) by Amit Machamasi documents the shape-shifting nature of the land around his home. The series explores the intertwining of human stories with the environment by featuring subjects who work in brick kilns, most of whom come from rural parts of Nepal and have moved into the Valley to find work and economic progress. Inanimate objects also find a special storytelling moment in Machamasi’s photographs.

archives-of-our-own
events

Archives of Our Own: Studying the Family Photograph in India

Shankar Tripathi Jan 21, 2025

Framing Portraits, Binding Albums edited by Shilpi Goswami and Suryanandini Narain, attempts to discursively challenge a fixed understanding of family photographs in the Indian context.
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