Symposium—Camera South Asia: Between Origins and Elsewheres

Join us at ICP for Camera South Asia: Between Origins and Elsewhere, an all-day symposium.

Marking the bicentennial of photography, Camera South Asia revisits the question of origins by treating it as both spatial and temporal. Rather than returning to stories of invention or singular beginnings, the symposium turns to movement—circulation, transit, displacement, and dissonance—as a constitutive force in the life of images. We take New York as our point of reference—a city shaped by diasporic aspiration and uneven arrival—and approach South Asia not as a fixed geography, but as a field marked by itineraries of migration.

Recent political shifts in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, and ongoing political struggles in India, Pakistan, and Iran underscore the urgency of thinking creatively between ideas of identity, history, and change. Camera South Asia III thus engages hybridity and difference not as inherited identities, but as practices shaped through encounter and return. Across historical archives and speculative futures, the artists, scholars, and curators assembled in this edition attend to mobility in its uneven forms—coerced and chosen, precarious and enabling—pointing toward futures that are neither singular nor settled, but continually unfolding in plural elsewheres.

This program is being offered both in person at ICP, located on NYC's Lower East Side, and online. Current ICP students and faculty of the One-Year Certificate programs are automatically enrolled and invited to attend all lectures.

SCHEDULE

Saturday, April 11

Welcome Remarks

David Campany, ICP Creative Director, Rahaab Allana (Co-chair), Debashree Mukherjee (Co-chair).

10:30 AM

Session I. Displacement Imaging: Tracing Unseen Cartographies

with Sumathi Ramaswamy and Prita Meier, moderated by Arnav Adhikari

11:00 AM - 12:15 PM

Artist Presentation: Azadeh Akhlaghi

12:15 PM - 1:00 PM

Break

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Session II: Itinerant Media

with Saloni Mathur and Yaminay Chaudhri, moderated by Naeem Mohaiemen

2:00 PM - 3:15 PM

Break

3:15 PM -3.30 PM

Artist Talk: Shambhavi Kaul

3: 30 PM - 4.30 PM

Closing Remarks/ Roundtable

4:30 PM - 5:00 PM

Reception

5:00 PM - 7:00 PM

About the Sessions

Session I. Displacement Imaging: Tracing Unseen Cartographies

Every displacement leaves its mark—not just as a shadow of nostalgia for a lost homeland, but as an act of liberation, a reimagining of identity and belonging. As artist and scholar Jyoti Mistry observes, these traces are not passive remnants but living forces, shaping how we navigate memory, place, and the stories we tell about ourselves.

This session turns to severance and dissonance as critical lenses, probing how the roots of belonging are both articulated and redefined. In a world where truth flickers between map and mirage, we interrogate the processes, histories, and politics of image-making—its public life, its power to challenge or entrench narratives of authority and erasure.

Our speakers excavate the present. Prita Meier traces how colonial and maritime encounters forged identities and aspirations, uncovering the tangled exchanges between South Asia and Africa—where memory, displacement, and representation collide. Azadeh Akhlaghi reveals how performance and photography resurrect the unresolved past, etching history and conscience into forms that demand reckoning. Sumathi Ramaswamy explores how a 1914 photograph of M.K. Gandhi—transforming from an English gentleman while in South Africa into the guise of an indentured Indian labourer—marked a pivotal shift in his activism that continues to be circulated in the present.

Together, they ask: How might new visions for South Asia emerge from rupture and return, laying bare what is lost—and found—in the global flow of images?

Session II. Itinerant Media

This panel brings together artistic and scholarly practices that theorize migration and labor through mobility as a relational and generative condition. Moving beyond narratives of displacement, the panel examines how transit produces provisional commons, material infrastructures, and speculative temporalities. Saloni Mathur traces the figure of luggage across modern and contemporary art, showing how “suitcase aesthetics” register the labor, racialization, and uneven economies embedded in migrant movement. Yaminay Chaudhuri reads Karachi’s Clifton beach as an in-between place, a space between land and sea, and a place for itinerants to find a tentative home. Where the suitcase embodies a desire for movement and border-crossing, the beach embodies the border itself. Both papers use the materiality of their central objects–itinerant media–to reflect on the possibilities of the image itself as an ‘unstable boundary condition.’

Presented by: