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CWC Global: Devastated (Vidhvastha)
with Ashish Avikunthak (director)
and Rumi (cinematographer)
Thursday, February 19 / 7:00 PM
Pollock Theater, UCSB
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In Devastated (2024), a middle-aged policeman in present-day India opens up to his wife and lover about his work as a “sacrificial assistant,” a state-designated agent tasked with extrajudicial killings of Muslim men. Elsewhere in the city, Lord Krishna and the prince Arjuna enact a dialogue from the Bhagavad Gita. After being paralyzed during battle by unwillingness to kill his own relatives, Arjuna seeks the counsel of Krishna, who instructs him on the moral duty of a warrior. Avant-garde filmmaker Ashish Avikunthak uses images of animal sacrifice and ritual self-mortification, repeatedly intercut with the policeman’s defense of his killings, to raise questions about the hierarchy of violence and the nature of divinity.
Director Ashish Avikunthak and cinematographer Rumi (Pratyush Bhattacharyya) will join moderator Vivek Karthikeyan (Art, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of Devastated.
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Ashish Avikunthak (director)
Ashish Avikunthak is an Indian avant-garde filmmaker, film theorist, and anthropologist whose work has been presented internationally at major festivals, museums, and galleries, including Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, and the Locarno, Rotterdam, and Berlin film festivals. He has had retrospectives at MUBI, Bard College, and Yale University, and was named a Future Great by ArtReview in 2014. In 2025, he received the Ground Glass Award from Prismatic Ground for his outstanding contributions to experimental media. He is currently Professor of Film/Media at the University of Rhode Island.
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Rumi (cinematographer)
Rumi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He holds a master’s degree in Filmmaking from the London Film School and has worked as a cinematographer on films across India, the United Kingdom, Japan, Bangladesh, and the United States. Since 2018, he has shot four of Ashish Avikunthak’s feature films, including Devastated. His research focuses on the histories and aesthetics of cinematography in Indian and transnational experimental documentary.
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Moderator Vivek Karthikeyan
(Art, UCSB)
Vivek Karthikeyan is a transdisciplinary artist-researcher working at the intersection of experimental film and video, computational media, expanded cinema, and installation. Trained as a cinematographer, he has apprenticed with leading Indian filmmakers including Rajiv Menon and Ranjan Palit, working on projects across India, South Korea, and the United States. His research explores a transmodernist experimental moving-image praxis informed by Indian avant-garde traditions.
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