— Conducted by Sumita Chakravarty The following conversation was inspired by an exhibition by Jesse Chun in which bureaucratic documents of travel are central to artworks that unpack their varied meanings. such documents are at once material objects and carriers of fraught signification in the contemporary world. Chun literally peels back the layers to bring to …
— by Andrea Avidad and Sumita Chakravarty “The reaction of which man has been dispossessed can be replaced only by belief. Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears. The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in the world –this is the power of the modern cinema” …
– by Sumita Chakravarty There is a kind of matter-of-factness in the voices we hear in Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project, a series of eight videos that is currently installed in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Each video is projected on a screen and as we move from …
– Sumita Chakravarty A brand-new and impressive Emigration Museum in Gydnia, Poland overlooks the Baltic Sea, conjuring up for the visitor the scene of countless departures of Poles for other shores over the past three centuries. As the museum’s brochure informs us, 20 million Poles are currently living abroad, and the Polish diaspora is the …
By Sumita Chakravarty Lotte’s mother: How did you know it was me? Nejat Aksu: You are the saddest person here. In his film, The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite, 2008), Turkish-German filmmaker, Fatih Akin foregrounds pain, loss, and the pathos of brief encounters through three intertwined narratives that touch each other, one might …
If, as Alfred Korzybski famously observed, “The map is not the territory,” what are some alternate ways of exploring our relationship to the areas we traverse and the spaces we occupy? There is by now a vast literature on cartography and map-making as it historically evolved to make possible the ubiquity of maps that we …
— by Sumita Chakravarty The U.S. presidential campaign of 2016 has once again brought the issue of migration and citizenship to the forefront of political debate and public discussion. In particular, immigration into the U.S. as a threat to national well-being and economic prosperity is regarded as one of the two major reasons for the …
