The Fates of Family Album

Vijai Maia Patchnineelam, Hemant Sareen and Akansha Rastogi

Part of The Elemental You exhibition

Date: 14 Dec 24

Time: 6.00pm – 7.30pm

Location: KNMA Saket

Devised as a conversation, this session will comb through self-invitations, prompts, stories, and revelations that leafing through an archive or a family album brings along. Thinking with the materiality, looseness, and constitution of family archives, and in particular photographic archives, the discussion will engage with various forms and formats of sharing family albums in public spaces. Further, it will invite a collective reading of Vijai Maia Patchineelam’s installation samba shiva, a coursework which is based on his edited photobook Samba Shiva: The Photographs of Sambasiva Rao Patchineelam. The installation is part of the exhibition ‘The Elemental You’ at KNMA.

Vijai Maia Patchineelam is an artist researcher and educator. His artistic practice focuses on the dialogue between the artist and the art institution. Placing the role of the artist as a worker in the foreground, Vijai’s research-driven artistic practice experiments with and argues for a more permanent role for artists — one in which artists become a constitutive part of the inner workings of art institutions. A recent outcome of his PhD (2022), which experimented with and advocated for a job position for artists inside art institutions, is the implementation of the position of "artist as a public mediator" at the art space KIOSK, Ghent, Belgium.

Hemant Sareen is an independent writer, editor and photographer based in New Delhi. He writes on modern and contemporary art, photography, and moving image. He is the editor of Ranbir Kaleka: Moving Image Works, Kerber Verlag (2018). He was also a contributing editor and an associate editor for Art Asia Pacific magazine. Recently, he designed and taught global humanities courses titled ‘Globalization and Photography and Global Cultures of Exhibition and Viewing’ at Ambedkar University in New Delhi.

Akansha Rastogi is Senior Curator of Exhibitions and Programming at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in New Delhi, India. She has curated the recent exhibition ‘The Elemental You’ at KNMA. Rastogi has been part of the core instituting team of the museum since 2011. As a creative practitioner, she is the founding member of artist collective WALA (formed in 2009), and is intensely involved with many artists-led initiatives and forums in New Delhi.