Writing Initiatives

ESSAY 1

The Pre-Emergent Image by Mila Samdub

Mila Samdub is a writer and curator based in New Delhi. He studied creative writing at Bard College in upstate New York and was a curator at Khoj International Artists’ Association in New Delhi. He works on contemporary technology and modernist architecture (on which he posts as @delhimodernism). The future is his abiding research interest. 

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ESSAY 2

Other Photography Histories by Rahaab Allana

Rahaab Allana is Curator/Publisher of the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts in New Delhi; Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in London and Honorary Research Fellow at the University College, London, and has recently received the Charles Wallace Grant for short term research in the UK. He currently serves on the Advisory Committees of the Foundation for International Dialogue (Rome); an interim jury for the British Journal of Photography; the India International Center, New Delhi; the Kaladarshan Art Committee, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi; and is Advisory/Juror for the prestigious Prix Pictet Award, London/Switzerland/Paris; The Mack Book Award (London); as well as the Chennai Photo Biennale (India). He was previously on the Cultural Committee of the Alliance Francaise de Delhi for 2 years. He has curated, edited and contributed to national and international publications, working closely in Museums and galleries such as The Brunei Gallery (London), Rencontres d’Arles (Espace Van Gogh, France), The Folkwang, Photography Museum (Berlin), the Rubin Museum (New York), Banco de Brazil (Rio), the Royal Fine Art Museum (Brussels) as well as National Museum, Delhi; The British Council, New Delhi; the Bhau Daji Lad City Museum in Mumbai where he teaches an annual, diploma course on the History of Photography in India. Rahaab has delivered lectures on photography most recently in Paris (July 2018) at the prestigious European Council for South Asian Studies. In the UK, he recently was Consulting Curator for the exhibition titled Illuminating India, Photography 1857-2017 (October 2017 – March 2018) at the Science Museum, London. In an educational capacity, Rahaab is also the Founding Editor of PIX, one of India’s first theme-based photography quarterlies and exhibitionary platform. Rahaab is the author of a publication on World Heritage Sites, titled Inherited Spaces, Inhabited Places (2010) produced by the Ministry of External Affairs; and has been Guest Editor for reputable publications such as Marg (Aperture and Identity) and the Lalit Kala Akademi (Depth of Field) in 2009 and 2012 respectively, looking at the history of art and photography in India. He has written and edited several volumes on photography for the Alkazi Collection for Mapin publishers as well. His forthcoming essay on the History of ‘Photography and Museum Practices’ will be published later this year as part of an edited volume by the renowned art critic, Gayatri Sinha; and he is currently working on a Photography Reader for S. Asia. As a collector in his own right he has co-authored and published a book from renowned collections of Cinema stills and ephemera, titled Filmi Jagat: Shared Universe of Early Hindi Cinema (Niyogi Books), exploring a subculture of photography and print media through a found scrapbook.
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ESSAY 3

Reflecting on Still/Moving: The Folds within Photography and Cinema by Sabeena Gadihoke

Sabeena Gadihoke is a professor at the A.J.K. Mass Communications Research Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia, where she teaches Digital Media Arts. She started her career as an independent documentary filmmaker and cameraperson and was a member of Mediastorm, India’s first women’s video collective. Gadihoke was a Fulbright Fellow at Syracuse University during 1995-6 and has published widely, including a book on India’s first woman press photographer Homai Vyarawalla titled Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla (Mapin/ Parzor Foundation, 2006). She has curated several shows on photography including a retrospective of Homai Vyarawalla at the National Gallery of Modern Art in three cities during 2010-11, and more recently a retrospective of Jitendra Arya at the NGMA Mumbai and Bangalore titled Light Works. Her research interests focus on the intersection of the still and moving image and she has written on contemporary documentary films, photo history, popular visual culture and female stardom in Bombay cinema.

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ESSAY 4

Out of Turn, Being Together Otherwise

Meenakshi Thirukode is a writer, researcher and a 2016-17 FICA Inlaks Goldsmiths scholar at the M.Res program in Curatorial/ Knowledge, Goldsmiths, University of London. Her areas of focus and research is on the role of culture and collectivity in the subcontinent within the realm of a trans-nomadic, transient network of individuals and institutions. Her recent projects include organizing the “Here, There and Everywhere” conference at MAC Birmingham, UK as part of the India-UK 70 years celebration (March 2018) and “Out of Turn, Being Together Otherwise” in collaboration with Asia Art Archive (AAA) at Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, India (December 15th-22nd 2018). Her research, writings and curatorial work is invested in the role of reimagining cultural and political spaces in the region through alternate methods of pedagogy, lost, erased and invisible art histories as well as intersectionality. She has contributed to various publications including Marg Publications, Critical Collective, Depart Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Hindu Newspaper, Whitewall Magazine, Art Asia Pacific, Art India, Art and Deal Magazine, Art Journal, Artmap Magazine (China), Of Note Magazine and Grassroots Literature Blog. She also edited an upcoming online publication FIELD REVIEW: SOUTH ASIA (Oct 2016) produced in partnership with Asia Contemporary Art Consortium (ACAC), New York.

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ESSAY 1

Bodily Inscriptions and Insurgencies: Performance against Power by Trina Nileena Banerjee

After completing her MA in English Literature from Jadavpur University, Trina Nileena Banerjee proceeded to complete a Master of Studies (M St.) in English at the University of Oxford. For her PhD she worked on a history of women in the group theatre movement in Bengal between 1950 and 1980. She has also been researching the interfaces between women’s protest movements and political theatre in contemporary Manipur for several years now. Between 2011 and 2013, she taught at the Theatre and Performance Studies Department at the School of Arts and Aesthetics in Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is currently Assistant Professor in Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Her essays have been published in several edited volumes and national/international journals. She writes in both Bengali and English. Her research interests include Gender, Performance, Political Theatre, Theories of the Body, Postcolonial Theatre and South Asian History. She has also been a theatre and film actress, as well as a journalist and fiction writer.
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ESSAY 2

“To Die Upon a Kiss”: Intercultural and Postcolonial Shakespeare in Kathakali Othello by Rose Merin

Dr. Rose Merin works as Assistant Professor in English at Christ deemed to be University, Bangalore, India. She completed her Ph.D. from School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her thesis is titled Contextualising Gender in Nangiarkoothu: A Critical Perspective on its History through Cultural and Performance Analysis. She earned her M.A. and M.Phil. degrees from the University of Hyderabad. Her M.Phil. thesis is titled Politics of Performance: Contemporary Issues of Gender and Community in Mohiniyattam. A trained classical singer (Carnatic), classical dancer (Bharatanatyam, Mohiniyattam & Kuchippudi), and theatre performer, she was awarded with Junior Research Fellowship in Indology for “Outstanding Persons in the Field of Culture” from Ministry of Culture, Government of India, in 2011. Her research interests include the performance of religion, gender, class, caste and body in the literary, cultural and performative fields; Intersection of cultural artifacts such as music, dance, and literature; Cultural Politics and Policies; Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Historiography, and Minority Studies.
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ESSAY 3

Body | Space | Time by Ranjana Dave

Ranjana Dave is a dance practitioner and arts writer. Her work in dance spans performance, writing, archiving, curation and pedagogy. She is the co-founder of Dance Dialogues, a Mumbai-based initiative that connects artists to provocative and diverse ideas, individuals, and institutions. Her writing has appeared in the Hindu, Scroll, Time Out, NCPA Onstage, Asian Age, Indian Express, and Tanz, among other publications. She curated and annotated an extensive online archive of dance video at Pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive). Ranjana is programmes director at the Gati Dance Forum in New Delhi, developing, curating and documenting various projects for the organisation. She co-curated and curated, respectively, two practiceoriented conferences for the IGNITE! Festival of Contemporary Dance in 2015 and 2016. She worked on curriculum design for a new MA in Dance Practice developed by Gati, which will be the first programme of its kind in South Asia to be implemented within the university system. Trained in Odissi, Ranjana performs and teaches the form actively. She also teaches courses on dance writing, history and reflexive practice. She has taught short courses and semester-length modules at KRVIA, Mumbai, Ashoka University, Sonepat, and at Gati Dance Forum. Ranjana was an Arthink South Asia Fellow in 2013. Her essay, “Liminal Spaces in Tradition: Odissi as a Continually Evolving Form,” features in Tilt Pause Shift: Dance Ecologies in India, published by Tulika Books, 2016. In 2017, her essay, “Significant Issues for Contemporary Dancers in India,” appeared in Marg’s special issue on contemporary dance.

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ESSAY 1

Kings of Shoreline: A Performance of Karalsman Chavittu Nadakam by Akhila Vimal C.

Akhila Vimal C. is a PhD candidate at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research interests are disfiguration and staging of relationalities of disability, gender, and caste in textual and performance practices of India. Her articles have been published in various journals, such as the essay “Prosthetic Rasa: Dance on Wheels and Challenged Kinesthetics” in Research in Drama Education (RiDE), and “Performing Disfiguration: Construction of The ‘Primitive’ And The Ambiguities Of Representing Pain In Kathakali” in Journal of Emerging Dance Scholarship (JEDS). 

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ESSAY 2

Clouds across a Triptych by Amitava Sanyal

Amitava Sanyal is recovering from journalism after 20 years of constant writing and editing. He has written on arts for various publications, including a music column for Hindustan Times for a few years. He has been a Chevening journalism scholar and a New India Foundation fellow.
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ESSAY 3

The Revolution Might Just Be Phonographed by Maya Palit

Maya Palit is a Delhi-based journalist who shuttles between writing and editing. She has worked in non-fiction publishing houses and digital newsrooms and is presently Books Editor at The Caravan magazine. Among her interests are fiction-writing, poetry and music. She studied literature—specialising in South African and Caribbean literature, blues music and science fiction—and might return to it someday.

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ESSAY 1

Loving with Language: Reflections on Writing Alongside Art by Kamayani Sharma

Kamayani Sharma studied philosophy and gender studies at Fergusson College, Pune, and did her Master’s from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU. A former text editor with the Bombay-based visual arts quarterly ART India, Sharma is a regular contributor to Artforum, The Caravan and Scroll.in. Her writing has appeared in The White Review, Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry & Aesthetics, The Kartika Review, Pratilipi, Take On Art, Firstpost and Studies in South Asian Film and Media. She has been a research associate to an anthropologist, taught philosophy to undergraduates, and is currently a researcher with the Delhi-based media studies programme, Sarai (CSDS).

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ESSAY 2

Panjim 175 by Vivek Menezes

Vivek Menezes is a widely published writer and photographer, and cofounder and co-curator of the acclaimed Goa Arts + Literature Festival.

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ESSAY 1

Lines of Flight: Confronting Syncretic Sacred Cultures by Senjuti Mukherjee

Senjuti Mukherjee studied Comparative Literature and Arts and Aesthetics at Jadavpur University and Jawaharlal Nehru University respectively. Since 2013, she has catalogued and researched visual arts collections and related archives with organisations such as Osian’s, Eka Cultural Resources, and DAG, focussing on film publicity memorabilia, various photographic mediums and processes, and political theatre. At DAG, she has also curated a film programme called Art on Film screening films on and by Indian modern artists. In addition, she has worked closely with several exhibitions of the contemporary arts during her time at Nature Morte. In the recent years, she has been exploring the material culture of the celluloid medium, cinematic and photographic apparatus, and undergone training in celluloid preservation and conservation at workshops held by the FIAF and Film Heritage Foundation. Recently, she has curated a research module on celluloid film studios and laboratories of erstwhile Madras for Sahapedia’s online archive. At Serendipity Arts Foundation, she has served as the Project Head and Editor for Projects/Processes 2018.
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ESSAY 2

On Matters of Hand: Craft, Design and Technique by Skye Arundhati Thomas

Skye Arundhati Thomas is a writer and editor based in Mumbai. She is a contributor writer at artforum, Frieze, e-flux, ArtReview, ArtMonthly and is Contributing Editor at The White Review.
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ESSAY 3

The Charpai Project by Bharathy Singaravel

Bharathy Singaravel is a member of the Editorial Collective at the Indian Writers Forum and a freelance writer. She is interested in cultural politics and has written on it for the Indian Cultural Forum, Newsclick and Umbra – Journal of Film Culture in India. She has worked at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art as as an Associate Researcher and at Nature Morte as a Gallery Manager.

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