Facing History and Ourselves | A Conversation between Subasri Krishnan and Tarun Bhartiya | Project Showcase@IFA | September 27, 2023
India Foundation for the Arts (IFA)
invites you to
Facing History and Ourselves*
A Conversation on Citizenship and Exclusions
between Subasri Krishnan and Tarun Bhartiya
Wednesday, September 27, 2023 | 06:30 PM IST onwards | Zoom and Facebook Live
The contemporary history of Assam is rooted in early colonialism, the partition of India in 1947, and the migrations that ensued in colonial and postcolonial times, resulting in contestations around social, political, linguistic and ethnic identity. This led to dangerous uncertainties and volatile questions around citizenship, rendering a large number of people stateless. There are various categories of this ‘statelessness’ in which people in Assam find themselves, leading to a group of people called ‘Foreigners’, ‘Doubtful’ (D) voters, many of whom have languished in detention centres for several years or those who do not find their names in the National Register of Citizens, that could potentially leave 1.9 million people stateless.
Join us to listen to Subasri Krishnan in conversation with Tarun Bhartiya as she unpacks how geopolitical events and political manipulations in Assam have disrupted and fragmented lives of people and dehumanised them into mere legal categories of ‘refugee’, ‘illegal migrants’ and ‘citizens’. The session will look into Subasri’s larger ongoing work spreading over decades in Assam, and the audio-visual project conceived by her as part of the IFA-PARI collaboration under the Archives and Museums programme which seeks to create alternate histories of people of Assam, whose lives are rendered precarious by the state apparatus.
Click here to register for the presentation on Zoom.
The session will also be streamed live on our Facebook page, for which no prior registration is required.
Subasri Krishnan is a filmmaker whose works deal with questions of citizenship through the lens of memory, migration and interrogation of official identity documents. She leads the Media Lab at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bangalore.
Tarun Bhartiya is a documentary imagemaker, film editor, Hindi poet, and an activist based in Shillong. He was a founding member of alt-space, an independent cultural and political space in Shillong, and RAIOT, a webzine of dissenting cultures. He has been a consultant for the British Library Endangered Archives Project and The Northeast India AV Archive in Shillong and is currently a Project Coordinator with IFA.
This session is organised as part of Project Showcase @ IFA, a series of online presentations to showcase, discuss and engage audiences with the diverse projects we support and implement across programmes.
The image has been recreated from a photograph by Subasri Krishnan.
*The title is partly taken from Subasri Krishnan’s larger ongoing project with the same name.
Subasri Krishnan is the Project Coordinator of the Foundation Project implemented by India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) under the Archives and Museums Programme, in collaboration with People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI). This has been made possible with part-support from Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi.