Artist as Citizen: A Public Lecture by Rashmi Devi Sawhney

ASAP | art hosted its public lecture by academic, cultural theorist and curator Dr Rashmi Devi Sawhney on 11 August 2023. Titled Artist as Citizen, Sawhney’s talk drew upon a section by the same title from her book, The Vanishing Point: Moving Images After Video (2022). Published by Tulika and West Havens, the volume addresses India's contemporary media history and is the third part of the India Since the 1990s series edited by Ashish Rajadhyaksha. The book tracks the fugitive afterlife of video and digital moving images as archives of public memory, works of art, degraded repositories of cinema, surveillance tools and instruments of governance. In this edited excerpt of the talk, moderated by Arundhati Chauhan, Sawhney explored the categories of “artist” and “citizen” as concepts grounded in language and history. 

Rashmi Devi Sawhney is an academic, writer and Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Christ University, Bengaluru. Along with Lucía Imaz King, she is the co-founder of VisionMix, an international network of artists, filmmakers, scholars and curators working in lens-based media to foster collaborations and generate wider debates around the field. Sawhney has previously edited special journal volumes on South Asian science fiction and fantasy, moving images and their trajectories in South Asia, and histories of labour and gender with specific reference to women at work in film and media histories. She has also curated several exhibitions around documentary, cinema, video and moving image works, including Loss and Transience (Hong-gah Museum, Taipei, 2021), SET.RESET (Saligaon, Goa, 2018), Video Vortex XI and Future Orbits (collaterals of the Kochi Muziris Biennale, 2017).  

(Featured image: Still from Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon (2018). Directed by Anamika Haksar. Cinematography by Saumyanand Sahi. VFX by Soumitra Ranade.)

Recorded on 11 August 2023.

To know more about ASAP | art’s public programming, watch a recording of our public lecture and discussion with Christopher Pinney.