Contemporary image-making has become a reflex of our commitment to secular causes, but is equally deployed as a divisive and unreliable evidentiary medium, prone to endless manipulation, popular persuasions and diversion.

The present scenario marks ways in which stakeholders from both ends of the spectrum have tried to galvanise community perspectives, inviting the citizenry of image-makers to make/take, redeploy and share images towards ideological agendas, tactically steering public consciousness. In doing so, can we collectively articulate an unfolding cultural dilemma around new forms of representation, and ask some foundational questions again: what are key facets of today's evolving image culture and how will they manifest in the future? Can we further analyse or identify shifts in the documentary form?

With an esteemed panel of festival directors, curators and artists, the moderated session invites its speakers to bear on their personal/professional trajectories around the inevitable gulf in contemporary lens-based practices - the complex relationships of the regional and global, the artifactual and the artificial - thinking across disciplinary fields to investigate the feasibility of a common ground in a world marked by social and economic disparity.

Supported by Les Rencontres d’Arles, The Embassy of France and the French Insitute in India

Speakers: Sunil Gupta, Sheba Chhachhi, Pascal Beausse, Christoph Wiesner

Moderated by Rahaab Allana

Date: 16 December 2023

Time: 4 PM - 5 PM

Venue: ESG Auditorium