In December 2011, Amrit Gangar & Ashish Avikunthak explored the Cinema of Prayoga at a lecture series at Jnanapravaha. Cinema of Prayoga is a conceptual framework that locates the history of experimental film in India within an ancient history of pre-modern tradition of innovation, of prayoga. Cinema of Prayoga is a theory of cinematographic practice, which challenges the dominant forms of filmic expression in contemporary India, including the all-pervading contemporary Bollywood or the social realism of Indian New Wave. The five prayoga artists in the series are Ashish Avikunthak, Kabir Mohanty, Amit Dutta, Arghya Basu and Vipin Vijay. In the first of the series, 2 films by Ashish Avikunthak will be screened – Kalighat Fetish and Nirakar Chhaya. The screening will be book ended with an introduction and a discussion. Mumbai-based film scholar, curator and historian, Amrit Gangar has written widely on Indian cinema. After presenting his new concept of Cinema of Prayoga at the Experimenta 2005 in Mumbai, he was invited to present it at the Tate Modern, London in 2006. Since then he has curated the Cinema of Prayoga programmes with practicing filmmakers, and presented them at various venues, including Santiniketan, West Bengal. He had been the curator of film programmes for the Kalaghoda Artfest in its initial period. For over two decades, he had headed the Mumbai-based film club Screen Unit and was responsible for a number of curated programmes and publication of books. His writings on cinema have been part of several books and anthologies. His latest book Cinema. Culture. Capital. Context: India was released during the Kolkata Film Festival, 2010. Ashish Avikunthak is a prominent prayoga artist who has been making films in India since the mid-nineties. His films have been shown worldwide in film festivals, galleries and museums, notable among them: Tate Modern, London; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Santiniketan, West Bengal, along with several leading international film festivals. His short film Kalighat Fetish won the Best Documentary Award in 2001 at the Tampere Film Festival, Finland and his first feature film Nirakar Chhaya had its world premtyiere at the Locarno Film Festival in 2007 and it went on to win the Best Director and the Best Actress at Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival, New York in 2008. Avikunthak has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Stanford University and has taught earlier at Yale University. He now teaches at the University of Rhode Island, USA.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Sep 2014 13:30:00 +0000