Experimenter presents Siege of Darkness, an exhibition of two crucial films by artists and filmmakers Payal Kapadia and Priya Sen that underscore the swiftly changing dynamics of our social and political constructs and question the fundamental ways in which we experience relationships and share a common space of cohabitation and camaraderie, in an increasingly unstable and intolerant time.
Payal Kapadia
A Night of Knowing Nothing, 2021
99 minutes
L, a university student in India, writes letters to her estranged lover, while he is away. Through these letters, we get a glimpse into the drastic changes taking place around her. Merging reality with fiction, dreams, memories, fantasies and anxieties, an amorphous narrative unfolds.
A Night of Knowing Nothing, 2021
99 minutes
L, a university student in India, writes letters to her estranged lover, while he is away. Through these letters, we get a glimpse into the drastic changes taking place around her. Merging reality with fiction, dreams, memories, fantasies and anxieties, an amorphous narrative unfolds.
Payal Kapadia is a Mumbai based filmmaker. She studied Film Direction at the Film & Television Institute of India. Her short films Afternoon Clouds (2017) and And What Is The Summer Saying (2018) premiered respectively at the Cinéfondation and the Berlinale. Her first feature, A Night of Knowing Nothing, was part of the 2021 Director's Fortnight selection.
Priya Sen
No Stranger At All, 2022
40 minutes
For two years starting in 2020, this work has tried to find language for and ways across the bizarre upheavals of social and political values with the rise of fascism in India and a global pandemic. Filmed in Delhi, these incomplete fictions are of the people, places, and protests that keep the language of hatred at bay and absorb the city’s grief and euphoria. In them, are the continuous echoes of a violent and tenuous present. There is a shadowy sense of a protagonist who un-dreams it all; a stranger, who turns out, is no stranger at all.
Priya Sen’s films explore forms for tenuousness and ambiguity within realist documentary, and simultaneously play with narrative modes and cinematic gestures. No Stranger At All was commissioned by the 5th Kochi Biennale 2022, and has screened earlier this year at the 73rd Berlinale Forum Expanded, Experimenta Festival of Moving Image Art in Bangalore, and Prismatic Ground at the Anthology Film Archives in NYC. She received the Radcliffe Fellowship 2023 - 2024 and will be a fellow at the Harvard Film Study Centre later this year.
No Stranger At All, 2022
40 minutes
For two years starting in 2020, this work has tried to find language for and ways across the bizarre upheavals of social and political values with the rise of fascism in India and a global pandemic. Filmed in Delhi, these incomplete fictions are of the people, places, and protests that keep the language of hatred at bay and absorb the city’s grief and euphoria. In them, are the continuous echoes of a violent and tenuous present. There is a shadowy sense of a protagonist who un-dreams it all; a stranger, who turns out, is no stranger at all.
Priya Sen’s films explore forms for tenuousness and ambiguity within realist documentary, and simultaneously play with narrative modes and cinematic gestures. No Stranger At All was commissioned by the 5th Kochi Biennale 2022, and has screened earlier this year at the 73rd Berlinale Forum Expanded, Experimenta Festival of Moving Image Art in Bangalore, and Prismatic Ground at the Anthology Film Archives in NYC. She received the Radcliffe Fellowship 2023 - 2024 and will be a fellow at the Harvard Film Study Centre later this year.