ASAP Connect

08/08/2026

At the third edition of Parda Faash, organised by Asia Society India Centre in collaboration with Film Southasia, Pradip Kurbah’s The Elysian Field (2025) follows the lives of six remaining residents in a slowly disappearing Khasi village in Meghalaya.

In this essay, Banhi Sarkar reflects on the film’s meditation on migration and the quiet labour of staying, considering how memory, care and everyday acts of inhabitation resist the gradual erasure of place.

You can read the essay on the app as well as the website. Link below!

The editorial work at ASAP | art is supported by The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.

Keywords: Moving Images/ Film, Ecology, Labour, Resistance

https://www.asapconnect.in/post/1061/singleevents/those-who-stay?post%2F1061%2Fsingleevents%2Fthose-who-stay=

06/08/2026

Desert of a Thousand Lines (1981) by Mani Kaul documents life in the arid landscape of Rajasthan through an episodic study of the rhythms, hardships and cultural peculiarities of desert life.

In this essay, Arindam Sen reflects on how the film dwells on communities living at the margins of dominant Rajasthani culture, even as he argues that Kaul’s presentation of caste-based discrimination and patriarchy is too rationalised.

You can read the essay on the app as well as the website. Link in bio!

Image Credit: All images are stills from Desert of a Thousand Lines (1981) by Mani Kaul. Images courtesy of the director.

The editorial work at ASAP | art is supported by The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.

Keywords: Moving Images / Film, Analogue, Archive / Collection, Ecology, Labour

In Desert of a Thousand Lines (1981), Mani Kaul threads skeletal narratives—the migration of the Paliwal Brahmins, a Manganiyar musician's recitation of Bhati Rajput genealogy and the caste dynamics between Langa and Manganiyar performers and their patrons—to paint a picture of the layered cultu...

29/07/2026

Held at the Nepal Art Council from 8–13 April 2026, the exhibition Urlado Nadisari (Like a Rising River) marked the culmination of a three-year-long project implemented by Srijanalaya and facilitated by UN Women (Nepal) in collaboration with the Embassy of Finland in Kathmandu. The initiative brought together fourteen artists from across Nepal to amplify the voices of women and excluded communities from across five districts in Nepal.

In this essay, Barsha Bhandari reflects on the significance of the exhibition as a platform for women in Nepal to share their lived experiences, dreams and aspirations, highlighting its refusal to let women’s labour remain invisible or be reduced to a forgotten statistic.

You can read the essay on the app as well as the website. Link below!

Image Credit: “Her Needle, His Name.” (Sofiya Maharjan. Doti, 2024. Fabric and cotton collage, varied sizes.); “The Daughter of Rajuwara.”(Illustrated by Bandana, written by Muna Gurung. Kailali, 2023–26.)

The editorial work at ASAP | art is supported by The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.

Keywords: Labour, Gender, Installation Art, Resistance

Drawing on the lived experiences of 100 women across Nepal, the exhibition Urlado Nadisari (Like a Rising River), held at the Nepal Art Council, brought together fourteen artists as part of a larger initiative that used forms of storytelling to challenge gender norms.

29/07/2026

Nidhi Saxena’s sophomore feature film Secret of a Mountain Serpent (2025) had its Indian premiere at the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) in November 2025.

In this essay, Riddhi Dastidar reflects on how Saxena’s film captures the pulsating loneliness and longing for love that animate the desires of Pahadi women. Drawing on a local serpent myth, the film evokes the tactile experience of living with a lover’s absence.

You can read the essay on the app as well as the website. Link below!

Image Credit: All images are stills from Secret of a Mountain Serpent (2025) by Niddhi Saxena. Images courtesy of the director.

The editorial work at ASAP | art is supported by The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.

Keywords: Moving Images/Film, Gender, Speculative Fiction, Ecology

Conceived by Nidhi Saxena as a poem, Secret of a Mountain Serpent (2025), which had its Indian premiere at the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) in November 2025, reflects on the loneliness and desires of Pahadi women.

28/07/2026

An Online Public Talk on ASAP | art!
Mahasweta Devi: The Work of Witnessing

Date: Saturday, 15th August 2026
Time: 5:30 PM IST

Register via the link here: https://forms.gle/KZXwVKACVW7By5AU8

ASAP | art invites you to an online conversation with Joshy Joseph, Sohini Chattopadhyay and Tathagata Bhattacharya, moderated by Shamya Dasgupta.

Few writers have shaped the literary, political and social imagination of South Asia as profoundly as Mahasweta Devi, whose work refused the separation of literature from lived realities, insisting on writing as a form of active witnessing. This discussion revisits Mahasweta Devi through multiple vantage points: an investigative writer; activist committed to people-centred politics and Adivasi struggles; editor and public intellectual whose writings continue to challenge dominant narratives of power, representation and justice.

Engaging with film, literary and documentary translations of her life and work, the conversation will consider what these interdisciplinary lenses reveal about the person behind the words and how her practice continues to offer critical ways of thinking about responsibility and resistance.

Image credit: Photograph by Raghu Rai

The editorial work at ASAP | art is supported by The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts

24/07/2026

Najrin Islam's curated film programme Tender Guerrillas: Self-Filming and Q***r Becomings—held at the University College London East Community Cinema on 02 May 2026—foregrounds self-filming as a radical mode of q***r image-making in South Asia.

In this essay, Pramodha Weerasekera reflects on films by Srishti Sharma, Tejal Shah, Maya.nk, Nish*t Saran and Riyad Vinci Wadia, tracing self-documentation as an act of tenderness, resistance and self-determination. Revisiting works made across different historical moments, the essay considers how q***r filmmakers reclaim the authority to narrate their own lives through intimacy, memory and desire.

Read the full essay on the ASAP | art app and website. Link below!

The editorial work at ASAP | art is supported by The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.

Image Credits: Still from Maya.nk’s Boudinet’s Curtain (2024); still from Tejal Shah’s There is a Spider Living Between Us (2009).

Keywords: Analogue, Moving Images / Film, Archive / Collection, Gender, Personal Narratives, Resistance

Writing on Najrin Islam's curated film programme Tender Guerrillas: Self-Filming and Q***r Becomings, Pramodha Weerasekera follows the project's approach to self-documentation as a radical mode of q***r image-making in South Asia that transforms intimacy, vulnerability and desire into forms of resis...

23/07/2026

As part of the series, In Person—at the international symposium, Image Worlds: Approaching the Bicentennial of Photography, held at the India International Centre in New Delhi on 25 and 26 July 2025—Sarah Meister reflects on her experiences at the helm of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Aperture, tracing connections between the two, while thinking through their roles in shaping the medium of photography.

In this edited conversation with Bhumika Saraswati, she discusses photography's disciplinary frictions, creative self-identification, transnational dialogues and the forms of empathy and attentiveness that continue to shape our encounters with the image.

Sarah Meister is a distinguished curator, writer and arts executive currently serving as the Executive Director of Aperture, the New York-based photography foundation and publisher. Before joining Aperture in 2021, she spent more than twenty-five years in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

You can view the interview on the app as well as the website. Link below!

The editorial work at ASAP | art is supported by The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.

Keywords: Archive/ Collection, Publication

In this edited conversation with Bhumika Saraswati, Sarah Meister reflects on photography's evolving relationship with art, transnational conversations around the medium and the enduring question of what continues to draw us back to the photograph.

17/07/2026

The language of merit, citizenship and freedom is produced through structures of caste, class and state power as the relation between NEET and student suicides has repeatedly revealed. As the youth in India faces an unprecedented crisis today, it becomes essential to revisit anti-caste and anti-colonial struggles to ask whose voices continue to remain unheard within dominant narratives of democracy.

In this essay, the editor argues that historical truth cannot be separated from the lives of those who bear the weight of structural inequality, calling for forms of witnessing and solidarity that begin from the experiences of the historically marginalised.

You can read this essay on the app as well as the website. Link below!

Image Credit: Youth from the Florencia barrio of South Central Los Angeles arrive at Belvedere Park for La Marcha Por La Justicia, on 31 January 1971. (Image courtesy of UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. Source: Picryl.com). Portraits of Rohith Vemula at DYFI (Democratic Youth Federation of India) 10th All India Conference. (Kottakalnet, Kochi, Kerala, 2017. Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The editorial work at ASAP | art is supported by The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.

Keywords: Analogue, New Media, Archives/ Collection, Resistance



https://www.asapconnect.in/post/1058/singlestories/the-promise-of-historical-truth

Excerpt: This editorial reflection examines how the language of merit, citizenship and freedom is produced through structures of caste, class and state power. Reading NEET-related student suicides alongside anti-caste and anti-colonial struggles, it asks what historical truth demands of us—and who...

11/07/2026

Emily Jacir’s Where We Come From (2001–03) considers how walking and image-making become ways of navigating, documenting and resisting the restrictions imposed on Palestinian mobility under Israeli Occupation.

In the second part of this essay, moving through Jacir’s acts of counter-surveillance, networks of kinship and images of everyday life, Upasana reflects on a practice grounded in connectivity and circulation. Twenty-five years after its making, revisiting the work amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza, she adds emphasis on how collective remembrance and resistance continue to persist through networks that Occupation seeks to sever.

Read the essay on the ASAP | art app and website. Link below!

The editorial work at ASAP | art is supported by The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.

Keywords: Installation Art, Analogue, Archive / Collection, Personal Narratives, Resistance

In the second part of her essay, Upasana Das returns to Emily Jacir’s Where We Come From (2001–03), exploring how walking, image-making and circulation become practices of counter-surveillance and reclamation amid enforced immobility.

10/07/2026

Emily Jacir’s Where We Come From (2001–03), her recently concluded eponymous display at Experimenter, Kolkata, considers the weight of another’s desire to return home, move through and inhabit a place freely. Shaped by requests from Palestinians in exile and those denied freedom of movement under Israeli occupation, the work follows Jacir as she undertakes journeys that others cannot.

In the first of a two-part essay, Upasana Das examines how Jacir’s practice traces the fractured geographies of Palestinian life across maps, messages, roads and checkpoints, imagining life beyond the borders imposed by the occupation.

Read the essay on the ASAP | art app and website. Link below!

The editorial work at ASAP | art is supported by The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.

Keywords: Installation Art, Analogue, Archive / Collection, Personal Narratives, Resistance

In the first of a two-part essay, Upasana Das reflects on Emily Jacir’s Where We Come From (2001–03), examining how the lives of Palestinians in exile and those denied the freedom of movement become a way of tracing the many fractured geographies of occupation.