Archives and the Various Forms They Contort To
Speakers: Erika Tan (Artist, Singapore/ Britain), Fahad Naveed (Artist, Pakistan) and Layl Ali (Artist, Pakistan)
Moderators: Anuj Malhotra (Curator, Filmmaker, member of Kaddukkas) and Kuhu Kopariha (Programmes Curator, ASAP)
On the 19th of February 2026, ASAP hosted an online closing event for the exhibition The Seeds Sprout Dreams, part of the curatorial and research project Art Exchange: Moving Image, organised by LUX: Moving Image and Art South Asia Project, supported by British Council and held at Neighbour Gallery in Trivandrum.
About The Seeds Sprout Dreams
The exhibition featured a collection of audiovisual works, sound pieces and tactile objects and interactive forums, developed to reenact and embody the various informal infrastructures and ecologies that publics across South Asia engineer in order to organise their encounter with cinema. These include domestic spaces, devotional sites, private networks, makeshift theatres, cross-oceanic leeching regimes and landfills of amorphous memory. The works were rendered through the typology of a flea market borrowed from a short fiction developed by Kaddukkas.
The original works featured within the exhibition were produced from within a ‘sequence of making’ arranged in response to Erika Tan’s 𝘗𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘝𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 (2005), a work that animates the colonial archive of moving-image material housed within the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. The artists in the sequence - Fahad Naveed, Layl Ali, Ishan Gupta, Shradha Devkota, Megan Arranagu Reddy - speak to, around, about and without Erika’s work, which is positioned as a provocation within this folkloric process of making.
Closing Event: Archives and the Various Forms They Contort To
The closing event for the exhibition ‘Archives and the Various Forms They Contort To’ brought together some of the featured artists to discuss one of the central themes within the exhibition – the notion of the ‘scattered archive’ and what sort of interventions allow the archive to take shape or form.
The panel invited reflections from Erika Tan (Singapore/ Britain) whose 𝘗𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘝𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 existed at the conceptual nucleus of the exhibition, it divulged the collaborative working processes of artists Fahad Naveed (Pakistan/ Toronto) and Layl Ali (Pakistan), and how their work spoke to, around, about and without Erika’s film. The conversation invited the exhibition curator, Anuj Malhotra (recipient of the Art Exchange: Moving Image Fellowship) to introduce the show and reveal how the ‘scattered archive’ informs his show.
All panelists invited for this online event could not physically attend the exhibition and participate in the roster of on-ground events. The panel was thus designed to give audiences an opportunity to converse with these exhibiting artists and to further include the artists’ voices as part of the exhibition.
RECORDING
Invite/ Poster for the Panel Discussion, designed by Kaddukas Team
Art Exchange UK Trip
In the last week of October, Art South Asia Project (ASAP) was delighted to co-host five curators from South Asia for the “Art Exchange: Moving Image” programme, in collaboration with LUX and the British Council, for a research intensive residency in London.
The last lifting of the spoon by Stephen Clarke
An exhibition review is written either as a description, what was included and how it was shown, or in critical terms, an objective analysis of the main themes.