The Vanishing Point

The fading out of celluloid cinema, and the arrival of video and the digital image, mark a tectonic shift in our understanding of representation as an aesthetic and political act. As the cinematic image, defined by its indexical relationship to external reality, yields to images comprised of zeros, ones and pixels, the ethical contract between world and image opens up a new range of possibilities and problems. At this juncture, from what appears as the vanishing point, history folds into memory, the spectral performs as the material, and copies cannot be distinguished from the original. This volume casts a retrospective glance from this vantage point, tracing acts of resistance and defiance over the last three decades within the realm of the moving image. Visual and textual work by artists, theorists, historians, curators, and filmmakers from India is presented through mutual interruptions and alignments, enabling new readings of our recent past and signalling possibilities for our immediate futures.

Rashmi Sawhney is associate professor of film and cultural studies at Christ University, Bangalore. She writes on cinema and the visual arts and is co-founder, with Lucia Imaz King, of VisionMix. Her curatorial projects include Future Orbits and Video Vortex XI, both as collaterals of the 2017 Kochi Muziris Biennale, and Loss and Transience, Hong-gah Museum, Taipei, 2021.