Projecting (on) South Asia: Light and Sound at South Asia’s Borderlands | A Balzan/Neubauer Symposium and Workshop

UChicago Center in Delhi, Ground Floor, DLF Capitol Point, Baba Kharak Singh Marg, New Delhi 110001

This symposium investigates the interplay of sound and projection in and about South Asia’s borderlands. The symposium examines how outdoor screening practices, mobile technologies, and performative screens animate contested spaces and shape identities in urban peripheries and national border zones. Through these practices, landscapes and heritage sites become resonant, illuminated entities, revealing histories that extend beyond the act of projection. In South Asian films about the borderland, music and sound have often performed an outsized role. Not only does music speak of connections rent asunder by political borders, but the borderland—as a zone of encounter and mobility—is also a site of musical creativity and a means to communicate memories too painful to speak.

Engaging with ethnomusicology, sound studies, cinema, and performance studies, this interdisciplinary symposium centers sound and listening within screen studies. The rich and varied program includes a performance of shadow puppetry by Padma Shri Parshuram Gangavane and a dance/sarod/tabla concert. Panels address early mobile projection, projection at South Asia’s borderlands, and films about the borderland.

Schedule for the Symposium.

Please write to jubakshi@uchicago.edu for any queries.