The Epistemic Archaeology of Ashish Avikunthak

Explores the diverse aspects of Ashish Avikunthak's work, whose films are art as resistance.

For more than 25 years, Indian filmmaker Ashish Avikunthak has been making self-financed films that have robustly resisted capital and market logic. Starting from his early 16mm short films Etcetera (1997) and Kalighat Fetish (1999) to longer feature length works that he has made in the past decade-Rati Chakrayuh (2013), The Kali of Emergency (2016), Vrindavani Vairagya (2017), and several more projects in various stages of production. His body of work now amounts to seven short films and seven feature length works.

These essays rigorously interrogate, contextualize, theorize, and interpret Avikunthak's multi-decade sustained artistic output. The current global assertion of authoritarianism and one-dimensional interpretations of cultural history and practice provide a timely and essential historical moment in which to dialogue with Avikunthak's films because his cinema consciously contests totalizing historical and artistic narratives and constructs frameworks of existential uncertainty and fragmentation that force us to reflect on the increasing political, economic, social, and climate chaos that is infusing and shaping our early 21st century global ontology.