What We're Reading
1
Nishitha Mandava. “Following a Goan Photographer Across Empires and a Global War.” Scroll.in, 20 September 2026.
Nishitha Mandava reconstructs the itinerant career of Victor Pereira, a Goan photographer whose work took him from Portuguese Goa and Bombay to princely Gwalior and wartime Mesopotamia. Drawing on trade directories, military records, postcards and colonial archives, she traces how Pereira established his photographic studios and later worked as an official photographer for the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force. His photographs of military campaigns, landscapes and everyday life reveal a world connected by migration, commerce, imperial power and the expanding circulation of photographic images.
2
Hung Duong. “Trespassing in Plain Sight: Ambiguity as a Generative Force.” NO NIIN, Issue 36, September 2026.
Hung Duong examines how artists Hachul Le Do, Lêna Bùi and Ngọc Nâu use moving images to explore ambiguity, metaphor and indirect speech. In Vietnam, where direct confrontation with state power can carry risks, these strategies create room for dissent without making meaning entirely explicit. Duong considers ambiguity not as an evasion of criticality, but as a generative artistic language that opens works to multiple readings while complicating the demands of surveillance and authority.
3
Shirin Neshat and Shahrnush Parsipur. “The Interview: Shirin Neshat and Shahrnush Parsipur.” ArtReview Asia, 6 July 2026.
Shirin Neshat and Shahrnush Parsipur discuss their long-standing collaboration, revisiting the relationship between literature, film and visual art in works shaped by questions of gender, exile and Iranian identity. Their conversation traces how Parsipur’s writing has informed Neshat’s practice, and considers the possibilities of translating literary worlds across mediums.
4
Ifaz Khan. “Beyond Bengali Hegemony in 1971.” Jamhoor, 11 August 2026.
Through photographs, newspaper clippings and archival fragments, Ifaz Khan revisits the experiences of Adibashi, Urdu-speaking and other non-Bengali communities who participated in Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War. The essay considers how national memory came to centre predominantly on Bengali experiences, leaving other forms of participation and sacrifice at the margins. Following these absences into the post-independence period, Khan examines questions of recognition, dispossession and national identity, while considering what archival fragments reveal about the competing visions of Bangladesh that existed during and after the war.
5
Lauren Baccus. “The Artists Forging Ecological Ties in Female Fugitivity and Marronage.” Contemporary And, 3 December 2025.
Lauren Baccus examines the practices of Juana Valdés, Deborah Jack and Jamilah Sabur, tracing how the three artists engage with Caribbean landscapes as sites of ecological memory and resistance. Across their practices, water becomes a space through which migration, dislocation, healing and climate histories are articulated, while geology and language become ways of recovering submerged Black and Indigenous histories. The essay considers marronage not only as a historical practice of flight but as a continuing temporal strategy for imagining freedom.
6
Troels Steenholdt Heiredal. “How Disability Reshapes Photography.” ArtReview Asia, 25 September 2026.
Reviewing Obscured Portraits: Seen and Unseen (22 May – 26 October 2026) at Taipei’s National Center of Photography and Images, Troels Steenholdt Heiredal considers how through the work of blind and visually impaired artists, the exhibition approaches the photograph as something that can be touched, described and experienced in different ways. He asks what changes when disability is understood not simply as a subject to represent, but as a perspective that can transform photographic practice itself.
7
Samprati Pani. “Where do smells go?.” Chiragh Dilli, 26 September 2026.
Returning to Bhubaneswar, Samprati Pani follows the smells of red earth, flowering trees, street food and family kitchens through a city transformed by construction, migration and loss. Moving between sensory memory and personal history, Pani considers smell as a way of remembering people and places that are no longer accessible in the same way.
8
Somy Solomon. “Unveiling Keralam’s Forgotten Maritime Vocabulary.” The Hindu, 24 September 2026.
Somy Solomon draws attention to a little-known record of Kerala’s maritime past: a sixteenth-century Portuguese word list documenting everyday Malayalam as spoken along the Malabar Coast. Preserving terms associated with fishing, navigation, trade and daily life, the manuscript offers a glimpse into the working vocabulary of a multilingual port city. Solomon considers what this linguistic archive reveals about the knowledge of coastal communities, and how their histories have often been overlooked in accounts of Kerala’s heritage.
9
Mrinal Pande. “Saakhi | The Rape in Astha Kunj and India's Culture of Sexual Violence.” The Wire, 27 September 2026.
Writing in the aftermath of the rape of a seventeen-year-old girl in Delhi’s Astha Kunj park, Mrinal Pande questions the limits of public outrage, candlelight marches and calls for harsher punishment. She examines how patriarchal attitudes shape understandings of consent and sexual violence, including within the police, judiciary and family, arguing that accountability requires confronting the social structures that normalise male entitlement.
10
Anand Teltumbde. “IITs, IIMs and the Limits of Reservation.” Frontline, 14 October 2026
Calling for a restructuring of educational access, Anand Teltumbde examines the persistence of caste inequality in Indian higher education, arguing that reservation has widened pathways without dismantling the structures that shape merit, belonging and opportunity within elite institutions. He traces these inequalities to the unequal school system while also implicating the role of faculty representation, institutional discrimination and the proliferation of private education.
11
Ankit Mishra. “Bundelkhand’s Water Crisis: Community-led Restoration and the Ken-Betwa Project.” Himal Southasian, 18 August 2026
Ankit Mishra explores community-led water restoration in Bundelkhand, where Jal Sahelis are reviving ponds and developing local systems of water management. Placing these initiatives alongside the controversial Ken-Betwa river-linking project, the article examines competing understandings of water security, development and environmental change. Rather than treating water scarcity simply as a problem of insufficient rainfall, Mishra considers how unpredictability, local knowledge and existing relationships to land shape the region’s water needs and the communities’ resistance to large-scale infrastructure.
12
Kaashif Hajee. “The Colonial Afterlife of Indian Film Censorship.” Hammock Mag, 27 August 2026.
Kaashif Hajee traces the history of film censorship in India from its colonial origins to the contemporary Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), asking who gets to decide what audiences are allowed to see. Drawing on censorship laws, landmark cases and battles over films including Panjab ’95 (2026), Fire (1996) and Bandit Queen (1994), he examines how a system established under colonial rule has persisted after independence—even as the mechanisms of control have expanded beyond the censor board to governments, courts, corporations and political groups.
