ASHIM AHLUWALIA
Ashim Ahluwalia (b. 1972, Mumbai. Lives and works in Mumbai) is a filmmaker who works across mediums and formats, often blurring the lines between documentary and fiction. In 2015 he collaborated with artist Akbar Padamsee to recreate his lost film, Events In a Cloud Chamber, made in 1969. Ahluwalia’s film, carrying the same name, expands into a rumination on the vicissitudes of time and (art) history. In the same breath, it is also a heartfelt but melancholic portrait of the artist as an old man, made both as a single-screen film as well as an installation that reimagined Padamsee’s 1960s apartment-studio as one of the primary sites of Indian avant-garde practice.
Events in a Cloud Chamber (2016) had its world premier at the 73rd Venice Film Festival (2016) and an international premiere at the BFI London Film Festival (2016). The film has been included in solo and group exhibitions internationally, most recently at: Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (2020); University of Toronto Art Centre, Toronto (2019); Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2019); Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum fur Gegenwart – Berlin (2018); Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (2017); Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka (2016).
Ashim Ahluwalia studied film at Bard College. His documentary on the call centre industry, John & Jane (2005), received a National Film Award, India’s most prestigious film prize. In 2007 he was commissioned to work on a film and architecture installation for the 10th Venice Architecture Biennale. Ahluwalia was named ‘one of the ten best emerging film directors working today’ by Phaidon Press in Take 100: The Future of Film. His films have been displayed at festivals worldwide and at institutions such as Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Institutional collections that hold Ahluwalia’s work include Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi and National Gallery of Canada, Ontario.
Courtesy Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai.
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