The Possibilities of Participation: Rashmi Devi Sawhney on the Artist-Citizen

In this continuing video, Dr Rashmi Devi Sawhney further expands on her examination of artistic participation and production as a part of her public lecture Artist as Citizen. Moderated by Arundhati Chauhan, the talk marks ASAP | art’s ongoing engagement with public programming, centred around new and emergent academic work around lens-based art and media. The lecture concluded with an open session to facilitate questions and responses from the audience. Sawhney addressed queries around new media ecologies and their role in re-formulating the relationship of the artist with the complex contemporary moment. The discussion also included questions around cultural citizenship with particular reference to changing spectatorship throughout the last two decades and the advent of new modes of dissemination and reception through technologies such as video and digital platforms with their expanding audience. 

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. Sawhney has previously edited special journal volumes on South Asian fantasy and fiction, moving image and its trajectories, histories of labour and gendered histories of media. 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: Screengrab from Artist as Citizen, a public lecture by Rashmi Devi Sawhney, hosted by ASAP | art and moderated by Arundhati Chauhan.)

Recorded on 11 August 2023.

To listen to Dr Sawhney’s lecture, click here. Revisit Christopher Pinney’s public lecture and discussion on his work on photography and citizenry.