Ashish Avikunthak has been making films in India since the mid nineties. His films have been shown worldwide in film festivals, galleries and museums. He has made a half dozen short films and three feature films – Shadows Formless (2007), Katho Upanaishad (2011) and Rati Chakravyuh (2013). His films have been shown at Tate Modern, London, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, along with London, Locarno, Rotterdam, and Berlin film festivals, among other locations. He has had retrospective of his works at Goethe Institute, Calcutta (2004), Les Inattendus, Lyon (2006), Yale University (2008) and the National Centre for Performing Arts, Mumbai (2008), Festival International Signes de Nuit, Paris (2012) and 7th Signs Film Festival, Trivandrum (2013). He has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University and is now an Asst. Professor of Film and Media at the University of Rhode Island.
Totem Spirit is book of one hundred and forty-five verses written between 1996-99. It is a palpable meditation of being plunged in the immense universe of Dharavi in the heart of Bombay. Tremulously meandering between the wanton and the profound; sensually gliding between the corporeal and the inanimate; precariously teetering between the recondite and the illusory. These phantasmagoric poems offer chimeric possibilities of the spectral, ensconced within the real. Written with a visceral candor that is seen in Ashish Avikunthak's films, this book provides a piercing glimpse of a mind that is yet to become a filmmaker.
Artist book
2019
- Softbound
- 156 pages, 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.3 in.