Andrew Levine: The Day My God Died (2003)

“The day that I was sold, was the day that my God died” said the child. I first encountered Andrew Levine‘s ‘The Day My God Died‘ in a film festival in Mumbai, India in 2003-04, and it continues to stay with me to this day. Four years in the making, and against all odds, this independent documentary film remains a vital and important work in talking about the tragedy of the child sex trade, of girls sold into sexual slavery – human trafficking that engages in the worst forms of human rights violations. A film graduate of the University of Utah, USA, Levine first visited India and Nepal as a tourist, but came back again, to tell a story of a multi-billion dollar industry with children as a commodity being brought and sold, recruiters who scout them, traffickers who deceive them, the pimps and the brothel keepers who buy them, and the police and custodians of the law with their hands outstretched and their eyes closed. Justice indeed is blind. At the same breath, the film profiles motivated and outstanding activists and abolitionists like Anuradha Koirala (founder director of Maiti Nepal) and her incredible work in the rescue and rehabilitation of the girls sold into sexual slavery. Finally, it is a film about the resilience of the human spirit in the face of unimaginable pain, betrayal, torture, imprisonment, disease, death and loss. Watch.  Read More…

Paul Caparatta: Central African butterfly wing Portraits

New York, USA, based artist Paul Caparatta takes inspiration from an ancient Central African practice of the use of a very unique material to create striking portraits. Butterfly art – a native, popular art form from the Central African Republic, evolved during a rare, annual phenomenon in which thousands of butterflies fill the sky during the months of October and November. These butterflies, having lived their natural lifespan, fall to the ground where their delicate, colourful, textured wings are carefully collected and used to create pictorials of animals and scenes of rural life, mainly. A butterfly specialist, Caparatta does take care not to use the wings of any endangered species. It’s a fair bit of painstaking labour to create these striking profiles / portraits of ladies, all from the splendid wings of butterflies. Take a look.  Read More…

William James: The Will to Believe and other Ideas

19th C American psychologist and philosopher William James (brother of novelist and writer Henry James), pioneered pragmatism and set the tone for much of subsequent 20th C philosophy. In laying the foundations of pragmatism, he, arguably, seeded the first American indigenous school of thought. One of quite a few brilliant Harvard intellectuals of his time, James’s background in medical school and psychology prompted him to engage with philosophical problems with an anti-idealist stance of radical empiricism while abandoning the search for absolutes. In his optimism and ‘commonsensical’ rigor he theorized that reality is whatever we make it, and that universal principles are to be ‘militantly’ questioned. In this engaging (and entertaining) lecture at the Peninsula College (Port Angeles, Washington, USA), Prof. Wesley Cecil lays out the formative years of William James along with elucidating some of the key approaches and positions in his pragmatic philosophy. Listen in. Read More…

Edinburgh College of Art: PhD Scholarships 2014-15

The Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh, UK, is inviting applications for PhD and Post Graduate scholarships. Scholarships are open to new PhD students commencing study in the academic year 2015-2016. All scholarships are for full-time study only and they are being offered across the College’s five schools:

School of Design: Place, Body and Environment; Design and Digital Technologies; Materiality and Making; Mechanics of Narrative; Design History and Theory; Design Anthropology; and Contemporary Film Theory and Practice.

School of Art: Contemporary Art and Education; Contemporary Art Practices; Extradisciplinary Arts: Education/Anthropology/Social Practices/Sciences; Parahumanities; Contemporary Visual, Material and Sensual Cultures; Contemporary Art Theories, Histories & Criticism; Artist-led Cultures.  Read More…

World Architecture Festival 2014: Winners

This year’s World Architecture Festival held in Singapore saw architects and architecture studios from across the globe compete for honors in the macro categories of completed buildings, future, small projects and landscape. In recognizing worldwide architectural excellence and celebrating the built environment, the festival was attended by over two thousand architects, designers, and clients. The festival’s jury comprised some of the world’s leading architects and designers, led by British architect Richard Rogers, with Rocco Yim (Hong Kong), Julie Eizenberg (USA), Enric Ruiz Geli (Spain), Peter Rich (South Africa) and many others. Here is a selection of the winners of the World Architecture Festival 2014. Take a look.  Read More…

Mikio Naruse: Tabi Yakusha (1940)

With a film directing and writing career spanning over four decades (1930-1968), Mikio Naruse, is certainly one of the lesser known figures of the classical Japanese cinema. An unassuming and socially somewhat withdrawn individual, Naruse’s prolific film output from early to mid twentieth century, saw him engage with a diverse range of themes, while consciously remaining rooted in telling stories of the ‘bleak’ everyday. As Japanese film scholar Donald Richie notes “…given Naruse’s skill, devotion, and honesty, the world he creates through film remains both profoundly troubling and deeply moving.” In ‘Tabi Yakusha‘ (Travelling Actors,1940), Naruse places his protagonists (a pair of artists / actors / ‘clowns’ of a travelling theatre group), Hyoroku (Kamatari Fujiwara) and Senpei (Kan Yanagiya), within the context of a performance in a rural area by the ‘distinguished’ visiting kabuki troupe of ‘Kikugoro VI’. In what is apparently a light comedy, Naruse, manages to engage in existential, absurdist queries (in some ways, Hyoroku and Senpei predates Vladimir and Estragon‘s ‘wait’), while tackling issues of the role of the artist in society, of truth/reality and imitation, of human and animal. Watch.

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James Mollison: Where Children Sleep. 2010

A graduate of Oxford Brookes University and the Newport School of Art and Design, Kenya born photographer James Mollison, undertook a notable project while working in Italy, at Benetton’s creative lab, Fabrica. Weaving around the core idea of children’s rights worldwide, Mollison reflected on his own childhood and the spaces he inhabited, finally zeroing down on the thought of the bedroom and the child – a space that spoke much about culture, class, affinities, possessions or the lack of thereof. Since not all spaces where children slept were ‘rooms’, he chose to call the project ‘Where Children Sleep’. Combining portraits of children, with the spaces they sleep in, and accompanied by their individual stories, Mollison manages to evoke childhood and livelihoods across cultures and nations of the world – Mexico, Japan, Cambodia, Brazil, England, Italy, Israel and the West Bank, Kenya, Senegal, Lesotho, Nepal, China, India, USA among others. His work has been widely published worldwide, by Colors, The New York Times Magazine, the Guardian magazine, The Paris Review, GQ, New York Magazine and Le Monde. Take a look at some selections from ‘Where Children Sleep’.

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Søren Kierkegaard: Conscious opposition and crucial contention

Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard certainly remains one of the rebels and emphatic iconoclasts of 19th C Europe. An unorthodox writer and thinker of wit and elegance, imaginative, God-faith oriented and equipped with a melancholic bent while straddling a broad range of authorial positions (as is known, much of his influential work was published using pseudonyms) – his earliest publications ‘Either/Or’ (Feb 1843) and ‘Fear and Trembling’ (Oct 1843) I found a bit tricky to unpick, to say the least, as it became difficult to place Kierkegaard precisely in relation to the likes of ‘Victor Eremita’, ‘Judge Vilhelm’ and ‘Johannes de silentio’. I revisited Kierkegaard through my readings on ethics, especially through Wittgenstein’s interest in Kierkegaard, with Wittgenstein voicing that “Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century….”. Indeed, Kierkegaard, remarkably laid the foundations of ‘Existentialism‘ which emerged as a philosophical movement many decades after him, only in the early to mid 20th C. In his conscious opposition to the prevailing assumptions and conventions of his age (his antipathy and hostility to the Church and the academic establishment, professors inclusive, is well known) and in his crucial contentions about the human condition (of doubt, faith, love, spirit, flesh, paradox, choice), Kierkegaard remains relevant to this day. Read More…

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