21 & 22 September 2024
Film at Kasauli
A film conference in 1983 sees filmmakers, artists and theorists go up and down the hill carrying 35 mm film cans to the only movie theatre in Kasauli. In 1986 video arrives – and Kamal Swaroop’s Om Dar-B-Dar goes viral.
Archaeologies of War
Between 1976 and 1991 Vivan Sundaram organised numerous art events in Kasauli. When the 1980s arrived new technologies for both consumption for waging war, Vivan’s work changed. A look at the 1988-90 series Long Night.
There is violence in the air
Screening: R.V. Ramani’s film The Show is Already On (2018, 26 min)
A performance, an installation and sonic work are centred on the cutting of a concrete slab that once formed an outdoor stage.
Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a film historian, and an occasional art curator. He is the author of Ritwik Ghatak: A Return the Epic (1982), Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (2009), The Last Cultural Mile: An Inquiry into Technology and Governance in India (2011) 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 at the Tate Modern (2002), the You Don’t Belong festival of film and video in four cities in China (2011) and Memories of Cinema at the IVth Guangzhou Triennial, 2011, and the exhibition Tah-Satah: A Very Deep Surface: Mani Kaul & Ranbir Singh Kaleka: Between Film and Video at the Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur (Jan–Mar 2017).