KOEL SEN – guest at the KHM

In the presence of the artist, the KHM will screen Koel Sen's documentary short film "Bahava". In the following talk, accompanied by Anna Bromley (KHM), Max Jorge Hinder Cruz (AdKW) and Sarah Fatima Schütz (AdKW), Koel Sen contextualizes her artistic practice with feminist perspectives on the current political situation in India.

About "Bahava": In 1870, the famous Indian painter Raja Ravi Varma and his German sponsor Fritz Schleicher built a lithographic printing press in Malavli, near Lonavala. The oleographs produced by the press were mostly of Hindu gods and goddesses in scenes adapted from Indian mythologies of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. These oleographs became very popular and transformed into calendar art, found in the homes of almost every Indian. In 1972 the printing press caught fire and all equipment was destroyed. Only the slabs of the lithographic stones remained, which Schleicher had himself shipped from Germany. The people living in the village of Malavli took these litho stones, lying outside the press to build the floor of their homes, floors or schools and even hospitals. And because these stones had images of Hindu gods and goddesses, the people could not set foot on them, so they erased the images of gods from the surface of these lithographic stones.

The film traces back these litho stones into the houses of people, shows the original oleographs preserved by a labourer who worked at the press and retells a story lost in the forests of Malavli.

KOEL SEN is a filmmaker and artist based in Mumbai, India who works at the intersection of film and new media. In her film practice Koel uses archival and self-shot footage manipulating them to their core pixels using computer-coding.

Her film works revolve around ideas that are dominated by her own politics of radical feminism and subversion.

Her new media work, Stephen is going to be lonely when he is dead… created as part of an international artist residency by Goethe Institute Bangalore, British Council India and Islington Mill London in 2020 was in collaboration with artists from Germany, UK and South Asia. Koel also teaches filmmaking and new media art at Whistling Woods International film school in Mumbai. Her short-documentary Bahava won the Emerging Talent Award at the IAWRT (International Association of Women in Film, Radio and Television) Philippines.