Video Essays and Vlogs
Archival Footage Filmmaking, SOAS MA Curating Cultures Exhibiton
Visual research is considered fundamental to improving the museum experience, owing to the ability to engage with the physical experience of the visitors to interact with the objects beyond their immediate static visuality. Going through the archives of Wayang performances, I became convinced that I needed to include them in the display of the MA Curating Cultures Exhibition at SOAS Wolfen Gallery wherein students reimagined the SOAS collections. The compiled montage reinforces the circularity of these performances: the video begins and ends with the same performances, and circular motifs recur throughout it emphasising on the circularity of performance in time and space.
Video Essay, Assignment for Global Film Industries
This video essay emerged from seminar discussions on Third World Cinema, particularly debates around how Global South films circulate within international film festivals. When I rewatched Girls Will Be Girls that had premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, I began questioning how Indian girlhood was being framed for a Western curatorial gaze.
My central research question is: How does the film negotiate the Western festival gaze in its portrayal of girlhood? To address these questions, I employ a textual analysis of the film, alongside a study of different scholars.
The project builds on scholarship by Dovey and Sendra on elitist festival curation, and on Lydia Wu’s argument that film framing reflects epistemological power structures. I build two sides of the argument. I critique the privileged womanhood in the film’s symbolic choices, by referencing Brunsdon and how its construction of the privileged girlhood makes it easier for the western audience to ‘decode’ these symbols. I draw on David Buckingham’s discussion of the Gothic framing of teenage sexuality in Western media and the film’s subversion of it, alongside Stuart Hall’s argument about the responsibility of representing minorities in Western spaces, to situate the film within a more generational and psychological understanding of girlhood.
I conclude that the film simultaneously confirms and subverts the Western curatorial gaze, revealing how Global South cinema negotiates visibility within elite festival circuits
My City Vlog, Winner IIT BHU Competition
I made this vlog for an IIT BHU Competition wherein I won the second prize. This vlog remains a favourite of mine because of how personal it is to me.
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