Filmmaker, Artist, Writer

This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. This podcast is a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

In this episode, our host, Kinjal Dave, sits down with filmmaker, artist, and writer Paromita Vohra for a wide-ranging conversation about the artist’s career. As an artist, Vohra has worked across a variety of forms, including film, comics, digital media, installation art and writing to explore themes of feminism, desire, sexuality and popular culture. In this interview, she reflects on the provocations and practices that have shaped her approach as an artist, as well as the pedagogical possibilities that multimodal artworks provide in the classroom.

Over the next forty-five minutes, you will hear about:

• What inspired Paromita Vohra to pick up a camera
• The challenges of building and sustaining a career as an independent filmmaker
• Social, political, and cultural shifts in the India during the 1990s that informed Vohra’s media production
• How digital media technologies and the Internet shaped Vohra’s work
• How Unlimited Girls sought to capture a particular moment within a globalizing feminist discourse,
• How Vohra has rejected certain aesthetic and narrative paradigms to craft her own style and voice as an artist, straddling comedy, irony, and politically incisive commentary
• Vohra’s digital platform Agents of Ishq and the sense of community the project has built
• How to cultivate and encourage complex conversations about gender, sex, desire, and politics in the classroom
• Building intimacy with audiences and being vulnerable to criticism
• Vohra’s upcoming projects

…and more!

Guest Biography

Paromita Vohra is an artist who works with a range of forms, including film, comics, digital media, installation art and writing to explore themes of feminism, desire, sexuality and popular culture. Her extraordinary body of truth-telling, kinetic and intensely sensuous films, online videos, art installations, television programming and writing have made sense of feminism, love, sexuality, urban life and popular culture for a diverse and loving audience for over 25 years.

In 2013 Time Out Mumbai listed her as one of 10 artists who changed the way Indians watch films. Her work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, the Wellcome Gallery and the National Gallery of Modern Art, broadcast internationally and is taught in universities worldwide.

Her films as director include the documentaries Unlimited Girls, Q2P, Where’s Sandra? and Morality TV and the Loving Jehad: Ek Manohar Kahanai, among others and a series of short musical films including The Amourous Adventurs of Megha and Shakku in the Valley of Consent. She has written the fiction feature Khamosh Pani/Silent Waters, the documentaries Skin Deep, Stuntmen of Bollywood, and If You Pause, the play Ishquiya:Dharavi Ishtyle and the comic Priya’s Mirror. Her fiction and non-fiction are widely published and she writes a weekly newspaper column, “Paro-normal Activity” in Sunday Mid-day.

In 2015 she founded Agents of Ishq, a pioneering digital platform which transformed conversations on sex, love and desire for young Indians. She is currently its Creative Director.

Host Bio

Kinjal Dave is a PhD Student at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She researches critical perspectives on gender, technology, and labor in the South Asian diaspora at the intersection of Media and Communication Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Diaspora Studies. She is a fellow with the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) and an affiliate of Data & Society Research Institute.

Credits

Interview by: Kinjal Dave
Produced by: Eszter Zimanyi
Edited by: Kinjal Dave, Arlene C. Fernández, and Matt Parker

Sound mixing by: Matt Parker

Music by: Zoe Zhao
Blog post written by: Eszter Zimanyi

Keywords: filmmaking, digital media, media industries, gender and sexuality, feminism, India

This episode was recorded on October 13th, 2023 at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.