Papers by Ashish Avikunthak
Chalachitra Sameeksha, 2018
Exhibition Catalog of Glossary of Non-Human Love, Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai., 2021
Ashish Avikunthak is a poet of fog, and worn and derelict spaces. His films are often punctuated ... more Ashish Avikunthak is a poet of fog, and worn and derelict spaces. His films are often punctuated with thick, wooly air, enmiring isolated figures along rivers and atop roofs; the restless itinerary of his films revolve around not only river banks, boats, and rooftops but also fatigued dwellings, deserted antique temples and palaces, vacant construction sites. In framing this latter list, he is reminiscent of the American photographer William Eggleston in his eye for the hidden beauty of quotidian spaces, aged and faded, framed with fresh appreciation for color. In his 2017 film Vrindavani Viaragya, shades of light blue take center stage rather than Eggleston's reds. This visual restfulness helps produce the tensions running through the film, one announced in the title: a dispassionate love, an apparent paradox or impossibility, an emotional bond beyond passion, one where the cool blues contrast with tales of suicide and extremely complex love affairs. The visuals of fog and worn spaces provide an abstracted (which city are we in? when does this take place?), yet highly specific setting: an uncertainty as to where we might be located, an evacuation of situating context-and yet a sense there is a backstory stretching back, one known only through the indications of age and wear. It is a mysterious world, forever leaving us to catch up to its strange, teasing tales that never quite assemble into straight-forward narratives, but one marked by beauty and profundity. Narrative is confined, stripped down (we only see three characters, none of whom are named), abstracted and deconstructed through visuals producing problems of chronology and place. Vrindavani Viaragya is a film that teases the eye and the understanding, a riddle or mythos we can never quite get over or master, forever allured by the intricacies of its striking seductions.
Archaeological Survey of India and the science of postcolonial archaeology, in Jane Lyndon & Uzma... more Archaeological Survey of India and the science of postcolonial archaeology, in Jane Lyndon & Uzma Rizvi (eds.) Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press).
“The Anatomy of displacement: a study in the displacement of the tribals from their traditional l... more “The Anatomy of displacement: a study in the displacement of the tribals from their traditional landscape in the Narmada Valley due to Sardar Sarovar project” in Peter Ucko & Robert Layton (eds.), The Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape, London: Routeledge.
Exhibition Catalog of Kalkimanthankatha, Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai, 2015
Exhibition Catalog of Rati Chakravyuh, Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata, 2015
Exhibition Catalog of Rati Chakravyuh, Aicon Gallery, New York, 2014
Exhibition catalog of Rati Chakravyuh, Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai, 2014
Exhibition Catalog of Katho Upanishad, Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai, 2010
Exhibition Catalog of Vakratunda Swaha & Kalighat Fetish, Aicon Gallery, New York, 2012
Exhibition Catalog of Vakratunda Swaha, Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai. 2010
From critiquing the grand Nehruvian vision to endorsing the Emergency, S. Sukhdev is a paradoxica... more From critiquing the grand Nehruvian vision to endorsing the Emergency, S. Sukhdev is a paradoxical figure, claims Ashish Chadha, as he revisits the iconic India ’67.
This is the text of a talk I had presented at the Annual Conference
of Yale Film Studies Program ... more This is the text of a talk I had presented at the Annual Conference
of Yale Film Studies Program on 6 February 2010 titled -
The Avant-garde in the Indian New Wave.
This article examines the significance of colonial cemeteries and explains why they are sites of ... more This article examines the significance of colonial cemeteries and explains why they are sites of neglect and decay in contemporary India. By examining the ideological and affective meanings of a colonial funerary landscape like the Park Street cemetery in Calcutta, it shows how monuments of colonial memories have transformed into signs of temporal ruptures, which disturbs the dichotomy between the colonial and the post-colonial. It argues that the discard and abandonment of colonial cemeteries in the postcolonial landscape stems from the ambivalent meaning that such a heritage site generates. Using three pairs of conceptual constructs – Kristeva's genotext and phenotext; Freud's melancholy and mourning; and tropological metaphor and metonymy – I demonstrate that this ambivalence is located in an intersection between the funerary monument as a cultural product of a colonial ideology, and as a memorial artifact of personal bereavement.
Focusing on the epistemological homology between the construction of archaeological knowledge, ar... more Focusing on the epistemological homology between the construction of archaeological knowledge, archaeological evidence and the nature of archaeological representation, I examine the visual archive produced by Sir Mortimer Wheeler in India between 1944–48, to analyze the ideological ramification of the archaeological project. The discursive nature of Wheeler's representations was deeply embedded in the disciplinarian ideologies of the colonial project, the scientific project and the military project. This article analyzes Wheeler's methodical attempt at conflating the three projects by disciplining archaeology as a scientific practice in a colonial space. I argue that this was articulated by appropriating the ideas of 'epistemic marker' and 'ethnic marker' as visual tropes to transform the visual representations produced in a colonial context into a scientific discourse, aimed at transforming the discipline.
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Papers by Ashish Avikunthak
of Yale Film Studies Program on 6 February 2010 titled -
The Avant-garde in the Indian New Wave.
of Yale Film Studies Program on 6 February 2010 titled -
The Avant-garde in the Indian New Wave.