Islands of Hope An Online Public Talk with Avijit Mukul Kishore
On Saturday, 16 November 2024, ASAP | art organised a conversation with filmmaker Avijit Mukul Kishore around themes of home, autobiography and memory, and their inseparable link with political history. Taking examples from his oeuvre spanning across 25 years, Kishore shared multiple forms of engagement with the history of a young nation through the characters in his films, who tend to reference, either directly or obliquely, but always paradoxically, the hopes and violence inherent in the making of India, whether Partition, the “nation-building” period of the 1950s and 60s, or Kashmir.
In the context of the approaching Constitution Day on 26 November and Black Day–the day of the Babri Masjid demolition–on 6 December, both constant reminders of the need to safeguard our constitutional rights, Kishore took us through itineraries of the Indian modern, from the making of the citizen and its connections with imaginations of urban design, to an exploration of intimate domesticity as a site of revealing both, the trauma of Partition and the contemporary alienation of the twenty-first-century metropolis. His pre-occupation with the contradictions between lives lived and histories narrated, and the evasive quality of exilic memory that is in perpetual separation from and in yearning for home and belonging is ever-present as a spectre in his films. Emblematic of this distance between personal memory and political history is perhaps Agha Shahid Ali’s lines, “Your history gets in the way of my memory,” a crucial inspiration for visual artist Nilima Sheikh’s engagement with love, loss and beauty in Kashmir, the subject of one of several of the films Kishore spoke about.
If the questions of rights and citizenship Kishore explores through his work have taken on renewed and urgent significance in the context of the promise of Smart Cities and accompanying slum demolitions, the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 and the abrogation of Article 370, Kishore’s keen attention to form and the role of image-making and cinema in the process of culture-formation remains exemplary of the dialectic between form and content. Through a playful and provocative mix of formats, from 16mm film and digital videos in both colour and black and white, to archival footage from state propaganda films and mainstream cinema, along with alternative voices in documentary and experimental video, Kishore creates parallax views that offer new ways of seeing, making unfamiliar worlds we assume familiarity with. In doing so, the discussion urged us to disturb what is taken for granted, to question what is rendered as tradition, and to pull the strings of memory to ask how this might confound and interrupt the violence of history and create space for the everyday practice of hope.
Avijit Mukul Kishore is a Mumbai-based filmmaker, curator and writer. He studied cinematography at the Film and Television Institute of India and history at Delhi University. His collaborative works in documentary and interdisciplinary moving-image practices have been showcased at Documenta 14, Chicago Architecture Biennial, Kochi-Muziris Biennale and film festivals like CPH Dox, Sheffield Docfest, and IDFA. His films include, among many others, Lovely Villa–Architecture as Autobiography (with Rohan Shivkumar, 2019); The Garden of Forgotten Snow (2018), Nostalgia for the Future (co-directed by Rohan Shivkumar, 2017); and Snapshots from a Family Album (2004). He has also collaborated on visual arts projects such as In Search of Vanished Blood, with Nalini Malani in 2012, and Turning with Vivan Sundaram in 2008.
Featured image: Still from Lovely Villa: Architecture as Autobiography (2019). Image courtesy of Avijit Mukul Kishore.
To learn more about Avijit Mukul Kishore's work, read Anoushka Antonnette Mathews' observations on Kishore's opening talk at Beyond Story: Encounters with Essay Films at Bangalore International Centre earlier this year, Arushi Vats' reflections on Lovely Villa (2019) and Nostalgia for the Future (2017) as well as Ankan Kazi's essay on Squeeze Lime in Your Eye (2018).
