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Naeem Mohaiemen’s films explore memory, loss, and failed revolutions through multimodal forms. Blending archive, fiction, and installation, his work creates counter-archives that challenge linear history and offer new modes of visual-anthropological inquiry.

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This paper examines the multimodal film and installation projects of Naeem Mohaiemen as critical interventions in visual anthropology and postcolonial historiography. Through works such as United Red Army (2011), Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), and Jole Dobe Na (Those Who Do Not Drown) (2020), Mohaiemen engages with the fragmented legacies of decolonization, leftist internationalism, and personal mourning. His practice—spanning film, photography, installation, and textual narration—constitutes a complex archive of memory that destabilizes linear historiography and foregrounds the affective resonances of loss.

Drawing on multisensory engagement and non-linear narratives, Mohaiemen’s work operates as a multimodal excavation of revolutionary aspirations that faltered under the weight of geopolitical realignments and ideological disillusionment. His films blend archival footage, constructed scenes, voiceover, and spatial installation to create environments where memory becomes a contested terrain, simultaneously personal and collective. This paper situates Mohaiemen’s aesthetic strategies alongside critical debates in anthropology about visual representation, participatory archives, and the politics of absence, highlighting how his work stages a counter-archive that resists closure and invites spectators into a space of reflective witnessing.

Mohaiemen’s use of temporality—marked by repetitions, stillness, and fractured narratives—evokes the liminality of memory work in postcolonial contexts. His focus on liminal spaces mirrors the anthropological exploration of how environments become repositories of loss and resistance. Through this lens, Mohaiemen’s practice emerges not merely as a documentation of history but as a visual and sonic ethnography of dislocation, offering new modes of engaging with the entanglements of memory, revolutionary pasts, and the unfinished work of mourning.

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I here explore potential global partnerships to restore and protect Palestinian cinema, within complex dynamics of international archiving. Retracing, restoring and protecting Palestinian cinema is challenged by the circumstances of occupation and conflict, which exacerbate questions of ownership

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Envisioning a research on Palestinian film archives, the questions are different than in other cinemas' contexts. Since the 1970s the intangible rich heritage of the Palestinian cinema has been dispersed, with archives systematically pillaged and obliterated by the Israeli state and military, resulting in the loss of invaluable records of Palestinian history and resistance. With villages destroyed, libraries and documentation centres looted and archives appropriated by Israeli forces, reclaiming history has become a mission and a mantra for Palestinian intellectuals and activists (Dabbagh, 2020). For the oppressed, archives are not just passive collections of documents, but they are active sites of resistance and struggle. (Rana 2025) The process of archiving itself becomes a dynamic act of defying control and geographical confinement. (ibidem).

Rana (2025) argues how the global solidarity with Palestinians helped preserve copies of lost films, functioning as insurgent archives especially as the Israeli occupation not only attempts to shape the history of Palestinians but also tries to dictate how the present will be remembered. (Rana 2025). Here are the key issues for this research: 1. retrace the archive, find the films, assessing restitution and ownership. 2. Investigating potential global partnership to find, restore, protect and relaunch archive Palestinian Cinema; 3. Engage creativity for further creating alliances and interest in the archive. As Dabbagh asks (2020), ‘when the past has been subjected to a systematic process of erasure, how can artists, writers, historians, politicians, educators and activists in Palestine (and beyond, I would add) creatively address it?

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In a nation where religious conservatism and colonial legacies shape the regulation of gender and sexuality, Kucumbu Tubuh Indahku is a powerful visual intervention. We here explore the cinematic expression of queer resistance rooted in anti-colonial aesthetics and local cultural epistemologies.

Paper long abstract

Set in the socio-political context of contemporary Indonesia, the film Kucumbu Tubuh Indahku (Memories of My Body) by Garin Nugroho (Indonesia, 2018) follows Juno, a traditional Lengger dancer, whose body and subjectivity challenge dominant heteronormative, nationalist, and religious discourses.

Through a close reading of the film, this study examines how queer identity is articulated not through globalised narratives of visibility or identity politics, but through Javanese ritual, affective memory, and symbolic embodiment. The film’s aesthetics were marked by non-linear storytelling, ritual performance, silence, and spiritual ambiguity, resisting dominant cinematic conventions and opening up space for queer presence beyond representation.

This analysis draws on theoretical frameworks from Third, Fourth, and Fifth Cinema to contextualise the film within broader histories of resistance cinema in the global South - and of displaced minorities in the global North. In doing so, it argues that Kucumbu Tubuh Indahku subverts both Western queer visuality and state-sanctioned moral narratives in Indonesia. Rather than offering fixed meanings or resolutions, the film allows ambiguity, pain, and beauty to coexist, reflecting the complexity of queer life within postcolonial structures.

This study contributes to ongoing discussions in visual anthropology and film studies by highlighting how cinema can function as a site of cultural memory, aesthetic resistance, and alternative knowledge production in non-Western contexts.

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I here explore the filmography of Indian independent filmmaker Payal Kapadia through an anthropological lens, arguing that Kapadia’s experimental and sensorial filmmaking across Indian independent cinema and visual anthropology, contributes to decolonized forms of ethnographic knowledge production.

Paper long abstract

While Kapadia resists labelling her work as ethnographic or documentary, her cinema blends genres of documentary and fiction. This creates intimate yet collective narratives grounded in lived experiences, interviews, and personal stories. Her films reflect socio-political themes such as migration, gentrification, and student-led protests in contemporary India. Her use of hybrid genres, particularly in A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) and All We Imagine As Light (2024), embodies a search for a “third truth” beyond conventional documentary realism, through creative use of animation, photography and archival footage. By using unorthodox narrative forms and aesthetics, her filmmaking style represents an emerging form of alternative, decolonized anthropological knowledge production against the Indian backdrop.

Kapadia's decade-long body of work (2014–2024) only gained visibility in India after All We Imagine As Light won the Grand Prix at the Festival De Cannes in 2024. Her late recognition highlights imbalances in global cinema and how Indian indie filmmakers often depend on Western validation for limited domestic support.

Kapadia's filmmaking inspired by figures like anthropologist Jean Rouch, embodies a self-reflexive approach in representing 'Others'. I interrogate whether her cinema genuinely connects with its subjects or risks perpetuating extractive tendencies typical of traditional ethnographic film. Or if indeed, Kapadia’s experimental filmmaking can connect Indian independent cinema and shared anthropology. This essay contributes to existing debates on ethnographic filmmaking (Ginsburg, 2018, Wright, 2020), positioning Kapadia’s work within the broader theoretical framework of anthropology of cinema, specific to the Indian context, and the underexplored field of visual anthropology in India.

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Kaiya Collective’s platform for experimental filmmaking and visual research in Sri Lanka, opens space for relational, ethical, and political storytelling. Cinema becomes then a collaborative and sensorial process, with bodies, landscapes, and relationships shaping their aesthetics and narrative.

Paper long abstract

Kaiya operates as a living laboratory for cinematic processes that privilege encounter, improvisation, and relationality, offering new ways to think about the role of visual storytelling in complex postcolonial contexts. In this light, Kaiya’s work challenges linear narratives of recovery or reconciliation in post-war Sri Lanka. This becomes a starting point in which the collective dwells in the ambiguous zones of collective memory, gendered precarity, and fragmented subjectivities. Its practice brings attention to the politics of the process itself—how we film, with whom, and under what conditions. At the core of Kaiya’s work lies the conviction that filmmaking is not simply a representational act, but a space of critical inquiry and embodied knowledge production. The filmmaking process becomes a form of writing that is fluid, open, and deeply influenced by the sensorial, spatial, and social dynamics that emerge through collaboration. Films emerge through open-ended writing processes rooted in encounter, listening, and improvisation, making filmmaking a practice of situated knowledge rather than extraction. Films are not shaped by a fixed script, but by gestures, suggestions, and interactions, creating an interplay between fiction and reality where the boundaries of documentary and performance blur. Through this, cinema becomes a tool to explore the present, not to capture it definitively, but to engage with its contradictions, silences, and tensions. Through film labs, screenings, and hybrid methodologies, Kaiya redefines cinema as a contemporary ritual—a collective, affective, and spatial practice. At the intersection of visual anthropology, cinema, and social transformation, Kaiya explore multimodal research, postcolonial subjectivities.

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This project is a visual and sensory exploration of intergenerational migration, tracing the divergent experiences of displacement within my own family: my mother’s forced departure from El Salvador during the civil war and my father’s family’s flight from the Guatemalan genocide against the Maya.

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This project is deeply personal and political exploration of intergenerational migration, memory, and inequality, told through the lens of visual, sensory, and digital anthropology as a student from Belize with immigrant parents. It juxtaposes my own privileged, voluntary migration to the United Kingdom with the forced displacements experienced by my family in Central America, specifically, my mother’s urgent departure from war-torn El Salvador and my father’s family’s survival amid the state-led genocide of the Maya in Guatemala.

Drawing from oral histories, archival materials, and auto-ethnographies, the film highlights the tensions between inherited trauma and lived privilege, asking: What does it mean to migrate safely when your ancestors migrated to survive? How do family stories of violence, survival, and loss shape contemporary diasporic identity? What do we carry across borders, emotionally and culturally? How is history felt in the body and across generations?

The film utilizes visual and sensory anthropology techniques - layered soundscapes, symbolic imagery, and embodied narration - to explore what is remembered, silenced, and lost across generations. Rather than presenting a single migration narrative, it emphasizes the unequal conditions of movement shaped by war, imperialism, and racialized border regimes.

By weaving personal reflection with historical context, this project challenges dominant narratives of migration as linear or universal. Instead, it frames movement as political, embodied, and emotionally complex. The result is not only an intimate act of remembrance but also a critique of the unequal structures that continue to govern who gets to move freely and who must flee.

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Letters From Elsewhere: A Fractured Space of Belonging is a visual project that explores lived tension between political resistance and emotional exile from Turkey. Built around first-person video letters, the project is a multimodal space to reflect on displacement, belonging, and memory.

Paper long abstract

In the summer of 2013, Istanbul witnessed the most powerful political uprisings in Turkey’s recent history - the Gezi Park protests. Started as an environmental sit-in, it soon turned into a nationwide movement against the Erdogan government’s increasingly authoritarian policies - eventually suppressed by the state through heavy policing, violence, mass arrests, and widespread censorship. With political and economic contexts worsened, democratic institutions weakened, and life more insecure, it is harder to speak out. In 2025, the sentencing of Istanbul’s Mayor Ekrem İmamoglu sparked new protests.

Letters From Elsewhere is a visual ethnographic project developed in parallel with these events that emerges from and responds to the fractured sense of belonging. It is composed of first-person video testimonies recorded by young adults who left Turkey in recent years. Although not forcibly exiled, they find themselves suspended between places, identities, and belonging—often seen from the outside as privileged migrants, yet carrying feelings of guilt, helplessness, and unresolved longing. This study engages with questions of resistance, representation, and distance in multimodal anthropology. It offers a space of representation that centres the participants’ own narratives.

We explore how visual anthropology create meaningful spaces of representation that allow those caught between homes and identities to speak in their own voices. It further asks how resistance can be sustained across distance, time, and fractured emotional geographies. Finally, how might we understand resistance not just as a moment in the streets, but as a continuing and embodied practice of remembrance and defiance across time and space?

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An opportunity to reflect on the aesthetic dimensions of multisensory multimodal art-ethnographies and their communicative potentials beyond academic circles, through the exploration of my visual installations Streets of… / cities in 7 minutes, and Zelige Door on Golborne Road.

Paper long abstract

During the last decades multisensory heritage and the role multimodal art-ethnographies and digital technologies can play in preserving and displaying heritage has been increasingly explored. Theoretical frameworks and artistic and curatorial practices have particularly focused on the design, production, and fruition of multisensory experiences, while areas of study and research such as sensorial urbanism and visual anthropology, have shown an increased interest in the transformative potential of embodied, multisensory dimensions of public and artistic events.

For this presentation Dr Alda Terracciano will explore ideas, practices and public responses to her two seminal multisensory multimodal projects, the installation Streets of... 7 cities in 7 minutes, retracing the ancestral memories of three migration journeys in people's everyday life, and a participatory community heritage project culminated in the creation of the immersive multisensory installation Zelige Door on Golborne Road. Developed with members of the Moroccan communities in West London, the latter explored the interaction between bodies, memories and digital environments as part of a communal response to the issue of gentrification.

Both projects reflect the increased interest in the expansion of the concept of scenography beyond more traditional theatrical settings to include potentially all environments, objects, actors and actions (McKinney & Butterworth 2009, Lotker & Gough 2013, McKinney & Palmer 2017, Aronson 2017, Von Rosen 2024, Terracciano 2021). The presentation will offer an opportunity to reflect on the aesthetic dimensions of multisensory multimodal art-ethnographies and their communicative potentials beyond academic circles.

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Bedroom Politics is an unfolding multimodal anthropology of intimacy, voice and silence. Rooted in queer, feminist, and decolonial thought, it listens to textures of desire and the politics of sexuality within and beyond South Asian context - through sensory ethnography and poetic acts of refusal.

Paper long abstract

Bedroom Politics invites us to dwell with what remains unspoken behind closed doors. Embracing the unfinished as an ethical stance, it foregrounds voice as method and moves within a politics of showing and hiding. Refusing voyeurism and embracing polycentric, queer visualities, this work centres collaborative authorship and questions how sound itself may bear witness to embodied truths.

Through the weaving of visual ethnography, life histories, soundscapes, and community dialogue, Bedroom Politics invites us to ask: how is sexuality shaped, expressed, and policed within South Asian and transnational contexts? How do bodies and experiences of intimacy and consent bear the weight of social histories and cultural forces? Drawing nourishment from anthropology, queer theory, and feminist wisdom (Foucault, 1976; Butler 1990, 1993; Berlant and Warner, 1998, and Srinivasan et al 2021) and in dialogues with the histories of pornography, digital cultures, and public space - including #MeToo in India - this project traces how shame, longing, and recognition move across intimate and collective spheres.

Emerging through 26 hours of recorded life histories with South Asian collaborators, and through an iterative, evolving artistic practice, Bedroom Politics is not a closed archive but a living dialogue. It seeks to trouble normative scripts around sexuality, gender, power, and to imagine more expansive, more ethical futures for sexual narratives. Asking us to look closely at what is often unseen, it explores the public presence of sex and the layered, intimate politics of desire, tenderness, and harm that so often remain unspoken behind bedroom doors.

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What role does art play in audio-visual ethnography? In what ways does a focus on art impact representation? How can artistic expressions be used to better represent lived experience and the more than human? And what does this mean for the future of anthropological fieldwork?

Paper long abstract

Anthropology is intrinsically an artistic discipline in which we create imperfect and often bias works, which are naturally driven by our unconscious and conscious theoretical and artistic agendas. During this short presentation, Benjamin Buchan and Sol Carroll discuss the artistry of audio visual research and consider the various methodological successes and failures that have arisen out of their own fieldwork. They will base their discussion around their work Tsacolé which explores the endangered art of clog making in the Western Alps.

Drawing on theorists such as Tim Ingold and David McDougall, the filmmakers consider various methodological uses and benefits of an artistic approach. Such as, how art and sensory methodologies may be used to attend to more than human connections and dimensions and they consider how art and artistic research can co-constitute sensorial knowledge and experiences. Amongst other themes, they also explore how sharing artistic practices can be used with collaborators to archive knowledge, rather than to simply transmit it.

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Communicating climate change through the arts and/or humanities and especially though multimodal platforms can lead to more visceral connections, action, support and solidarity. I here discuss the impact of anthropogenic climate change on the lives of subaltern communities in the Sundarbans in India

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It has been noted that climate change issues couched in overly scientific language is not impactful on the public. Communicating climate change through the arts and/or humanities and especially though multimodal platforms can lead to more visceral connections, action, support and solidarity. In this project, I research the lives of subaltern communities in the Sundarbans - a littoral region bordering India and Bangladesh, often called the ‘ground zero of climate change’ - to write a script and collaborate in a theatre, photographic and filmic project on how sea level rise, tropical storms, flood and bank erosion have affected the families of coastal seafarers, fisherman, shrimp farmers, woodcutters and honey collectors. Much of the phenomena is due to anthropogenic global warming centred on industrial and middle-class urban lifestyles. The project’s aim is to create multi-modal immersion with such media to channel to relatively affluent audiences who are far removed from the stark realities of Sundarbans lives.