Stuti Ajaykumar Bansal

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Explorations will play around with experiments in expanded cinema, light and film installation, using microcontrollers, motors, multi-lens custom projector and analogue film to create dynamic, sculptural, and spatial cinema, pushing beyond the screen's limits. Stuti Ajaykumar Bansal is the Coordinator for this project. 

Stuti Ajaykumar Bansal is an interdisciplinary filmmaker and artist, having studied at the Friedl Kubelka School for Independent Film in Vienna, the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, and the Baltic Analogue Lab in Latvia. Her practice centers on analogue film, animation, installation, and performance, with a conceptual focus on light, entropy, and DIY image-making methods. Stuti’s artistic journey is marked by recent film showings such as Movement And Light at Gisela-Freier Kunstraum, Berlin (2025), and Self Portrait at Atlas Cinema Brixton, London (2025). Her installations and performances have been featured internationally, including a WIP show at the RCA and a film screening at the Deptford Contemporary in London. She was selected for the Khoj Peers Residency (2025). Stuti also shares her expertise through extensive teaching and workshop facilitation, focusing on light, movement and the body's relation to space at institutions like Srishti Manipal Institute, Bangalore and Anant University, Ahmedabad. Given her experience, Stuti Ajaykumar Bansal is best placed to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

The project titled Projector that makes Images run out of Screen will be an exploration of expanded experimental filmmaking, conceived as a means to redefine the screen's boundaries by reconstructing the projector itself. The artist will aim to transform cinema from a fixed display into a dynamic, spatial, and sculptural experience. Stuti is evolving a motorised mechanism to make the film physically run through the custom-built projector, featuring multiple lenses and a film loop. This design will create a dynamic interplay between light, the film material, and the sculptural form, investigating the intersections of animation, photography, choreography, space, and time. 

The artist is committed to using analogue film, specifically the 16mm format and found footage, as the material best suited for direct interaction with light, treating the filmmaking process as a tactile, material craft. Drawing inspiration from historical expanded cinema practices, the project seeks to resist the oversaturation of digital culture by embracing the entropy and material nature of film. The final installation will leverage the cosmological character of light to evoke a poetic and otherworldly quality, ultimately pushing cinema beyond its traditional limits and rediscovering its material, spatial, and poetic possibilities.

The outcome of the project will be expanded cinema experiments, along with light and film installations. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be audio-visual documentation of the artistic process.   

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme in the manner in which it attempts to bring back the sculptural aspects of film projection, with regard to the capture of light in optical media, on analogue film, and mediated through the optical functions of various kinds of lenses, which is particularly relevant in this age of digital media overload and doom scrolling. 

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm by convening an online gathering of artists coordinating Explorations projects. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees. 

This project is supported by Parijat Foundation.