Curating Documentary Film and Video Art in a Museum: Reflections from Loss and Transience

In 2020, Rashmi Sawhney and I were invites by Zoe Yeh, Director of the Hong-gah Museum, Taipei, to curate an exhibition of ten leading Indian heritage video artists. The invitation was extended to us as co-founders of the international film and visual arts network, VisionMix (that we have run since 2014) as a UK-India transnational entity. This project involved an India-UK-Taiwan collaboration in which we lay out key concerns around documentary films, spectatorial address and transnational curation.
The book chapter details a dialogue around documentary film curation when presented in gallery and museum settings, scrutinising the interventions possible through new modes of public engagement and the implications that this holds for the documentary form itself. Whilst substantial debate has emerged within the visual and contemporary arts about the important role that curation plays, this discourse has not yet been extended to cinema studies or documentary studies in South Asia. We make a contribution by drawing on our own experience of working variously (and differently) as writers, academics, artist-filmmakers and curators.