Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

As history is mythologized to reinforce national imaginaries, what becomes the role of memory, of lived and imagined experience, in transforming and disrupting master narratives?

UnionDocs is delighted to present GEOGRAPHIES OF BELONGING, a series of film screenings and conversations programmed with Senjuti Mukherjee, PhD student of Film and Media Studies at University of Pittsburgh

In RESISTANCE AND THE CITY, the first of these programs, we’re thrilled to share a selection of works from artists Utsa Hazarika and Priya Sen.

Posturing as exceptions, scandalous emergencies light up our phone screens, when in fact the twenty-first century has been marked by a world caught in a permanent state of crisis. The last few decades have witnessed mass protests against global democratic erosion, generating a constant flow of amateur videos, photographs and sounds produced by citizens living in multi-screen ecosystems.

As fatigue and forgetting are mobilized for diplomatic strategy, we turn to sites of counter-memory and forgotten histories to unsettle mainstream narratives of history, social memory and community. This screening and conversation will explore local and transnational inquiries into ideas of the self, place, belonging, remembering, resistance, and solidarity. With this selection of works, we hope to probe the dynamics of networked media and publics as they shape new futures.

Priya Sen’s video essay No Stranger at All was written, filmed and recorded during and after the protests against the discriminatory amendments to citizenship laws in India, which were cut short by pandemic lockdowns.  Sen explores the city through a series of images and narratives as the anger, joy and euphoria of collective action settles into the loneliness and isolation of the pandemic. In a world of intractable images, Sen’s work explores the obligation faced by artists to make meaning of our times.

Utsa Hazarika’s Two Yards of Delhi: naam is a two-channel video series that traces narratives around identity, belonging and defiance in Delhi. From Sufi singers to street-theater artists, student activists and children working in the informal economy, the work explores the fears, anxieties and desires of the city’s many protagonists. Round Two, previously shown in multi-channel installation contexts, uses archival footage, contemporary reporting, music videos and literary excerpts to reflect on historical landmarks of postcolonial resistance and immigrant narratives from the British Commonwealth.

Utsa Hazarika will be joined in conversation with writer and programmer Bedatri Datta Choudhury following the screening. Come through!

Special thanks to the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for coming on board as contributing partners for this series!

Program

Two Yards of Delhi: naam by Utsa Hazarika

10 mins, 2019 (excerpts & artist presentation)

Round Two by Utsa Hazarika

7 mins, 2022

No Stranger at All by Priya Sen

40 mins, 2022

Program Duration: 57 mins

Bios

Priya Sen is interested in eclectic, itinerant, and egalitarian film forms and the manners of presence accompanying each work. Her work has been screened at festivals and venues in India and globally including the 65th Flaherty Seminar, 2019 and Berlinale 2023. She received an MA from Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, an MFA in film and media arts from Temple University, Philadelphia, and was a Radcliffe Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, 2023-24.

Utsa Hazarika is an artist and writer based in New York. Her research-based practice ranges across video, installation and sculpture, and explores how an interdisciplinary dialogue between art and social research can push us to think about power, memory and resistance. Her work has exhibited internationally, including at the Queens Museum, Hessel Museum of Art, and Museum of the City of New York in the United States. She has attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, and residencies including Pioneer Works (US), Lijiang Studio (China), and Khoj (India). She is currently an artist fellow at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York.

Bedatri Datta Choudhury is The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Arts and Entertainment Editor. Before this, she worked extensively with documentary films, particularly in the areas of program management and commissioning. She was most recently the Managing Editor of Documentary magazine, and is a programmer with DOCNYC and SFFILM. An alumna of the NYFF Critics Academy, Sundance and SXSW Press Inclusion Initiatives, the National Critics’ Institute, and Berlinale Talents, she shuttles between New York City and Philadelphia, and can often be heard on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour.

Senjuti is a PhD student of Film and Media Studies at University of Pittsburgh working on new media environments, dissident citizenship, video activism and the transforming art and politics of twenty-first-century documentary. She did a Master’s in Art History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and a Bachelor’s in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She has worked as an archivist, editor and curator in India for over a decade. During this time, she led archival projects at Osian’s, Eka and Delhi Art Gallery and edited publications, including long-form research on visual and performance arts for the Serendipity Arts Foundation and multi-media research on South Asian film, video and photography for Alternative South Asia Photography.