Join us as author Sanjay Kak discusses his curated book project: Witness. The book brings together images by nine photographers from Kashmir: Meraj Uddin, Javeed Shah, Dar Yasin, Javed Dar, Altaf Qadri, Sumit Dayal, Showkat Nanda, Syed Shahriyar and Azaan Shah. The text emerged from their conversations with documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak, and brings out the varied relationships that each contributor has to photography—and to Kashmir—and in the process raises questions about the place of artistic practice in zones of conflict.

Witness began as a sort of 'archival' project, one of recovery. By the time it came out in 2017 it very much belonged to the present, as Kashmiri photographers suddenly emerged out of the shadows, with Pulitzers and global acknowledgement to follow. Two years later, as the slender autonomy enjoyed by the State was revoked in Aug 2019, a brutally enforced media clampdown followed, including on photographers. A silence has fallen on what was a fairly vigorous space. In some odd way Witness has returned to its early position as an archive.

This event is made possible by the generous support and collaboration of MIT’s Art, Culture, and Technology, MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, MIT’s Literature Department, the Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia, as well as the Boston South Asian Coalition.

This event will be open to the public at will take place at 6:30 pm in room 56-114.