To be presented in the Thomas M. Ryan Auditorium of the Center for Biotechnolgy and Life Sciences, 120 Flagg Road, the film presentation is free and open to the public.
Ashish’s film, Rati Chakravyuh, was shown extensively in India during the summer—for six weeks in Bombay at Gallery Chatterjee & Lai, three weeks at Expirementer Gallery in Calcutta and three days at Viswabharti University in Shantiniketan. It is now being screened in New York at the Aicon Gallery.
The single-shot,102-minute film opens with this introduction, “On the night of a complete lunar eclipse, six newly wed couples come together after their mass wedding with a priestess and talk.”
Arranged in a circle, the characters, all played by student actors, are dressed in full Indian wedding attire and discuss stories of India, life, death, beginning and everything in between. The audience will be stunned by the ending.
Named a “Future Greats” artist this year by Art Review magazine, Chadha is a filmmaker and a cultural anthropologist who has been making films in India since the mid-1990s. His films have been shown worldwide in film festivals, galleries and museums.
A faculty member in URI’s Harrington School of Communication & Media, he has made six short films and three feature films – Shadows Formless (2007), Katho Upanaishad (2011) and Rati Chakravyuh (2013). Most recently, his short film Vakratunda Swaha (2010) was long-listed for the Skoda Prize for Indian Contemporary Art in 2011, and was featured at Taipei Biennial in 2012. His films have been shown at Tate Modern, London; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, Calif., along with the London, Locarno, Rotterdam, and Berlin film festivals. He has had retrospectives 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 (20130.
His scholarly works have been published in the Journal of Social Archaeology, Journal of Material Culture, Contributions to Indian Sociology and The Indian Economic and Social History Review.
He holds a doctorate in cultural anthropology from Stanford University, and before coming to URI had taught at Yale University.