This programme was primarily developed by Hansa and Jayashree Kewalramani

Kashmir, when it comes to catering for the consumption of the main landers, is commonly projected as a conflict zone – lying between military operations, colonisation, territorial violence and identity politics. The signifying images of the conflict zone of Kashmir, captured and distributed by mainland agencies, are common and available in plenty. And before that, Kashmir landscape as the backdrop of romance was iconised by the Indian film industries and that too had prompted a sense of lost entitlements for the mainlanders in the present scenario . Both these image cultures, operating from two different ends of polemic and valorisation, have pushed the visual representation of Kashmir in the realm of the ‘other’. The tales and images of Kashmir have been mainly perceived in terms of its relation and utility to other territories.

But the images produced or initiated out of the lived-in experiences – as documentation, as hobby, as impulse, as memory, as subversion, as protest, as fun, as art works – are rarely deliberated on outside a limited group or agencies. The reasons for it are many and contradictory. Though, like all such people who live far away from the highway of development and thus had no access to image making in analogous time, Kashmiris had quickly adopted to the video and digital technology since the early 1990s. This technological expansion coincided with the political phase that is commonly called as ‘insurgency of the ‘90s’. Kashmir begun to produce images of itself. Aaaaaa aaaaa aaaa.

Majlis made a modest and tentative attempt to build an archive of such images – not to take the materials out of the site of the source but only to help consolidate the resources and create possibilities of pedagogical exchange. Over the years we developed a connect with the local image makers – neighbourhood history enthusiasts, press photographers, television journalists, photo studio owners, amateur archivists, commercial CD outlets, video editing outfits, media students and so on. Their contributions were matched with clips from Kashmiri newspapers, reports of commissions and activist groups, and documentations of solidarity events in the mainland. We also collected a number of independent documentary and documentation of artworks on Kashmir as well as state sponsored TV programme that were produced in abundance in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Two eminent filmmakers, Saeed Akhtar Mirza and Pankaj Rishi Kumar, who have extensively worked on Kashmir donated their entire footage (unedited) to the archive. In each of these instances series of conversation and exchange with the image makers preceded the actual collection.

Later we tried to create some safe spaces and invited certain artists, curators, filmmakers, cultural scientists and other engaged people to think through the issues of visual representations, public image cultures, politics of access and narrative potentials of documentary images based on the diverse collection. That was a slow and intense process of negotiating through political compulsions; majoritarian impulses; histories of persecutions; layers of personal, private and public motivations; and notions of centres and peripheries. Sometimes this process got reflected and acknowledged in the works of the artists and the writers years after such interactions had taken place. Instead of open circulation of the actual material these small group exercises managed to consolidate a critical consciousness about such material collections.

That is the story of our modest work on found image archive of Kashmir in the 1990s. As the political situation rapidly worsened in the following decades it became impossible to persuade the venture with our modest political and financial resources. Copies of the entire archive, catalogued and partly annotated, have been donated to local documentation centres. For the easily conceivable reason it has not yet been made publicly accessible.

Here we upload a few documents from the archive to communicate the range of this exercise.

• Meeting People on Dal Lake_Saeed Mirza_1997
• Kumkum Sangari talks with Nilima Sheikh_2010
• Public Service Media in Kashmir_Farooq Nazki_2007
• Pather Artists Gulam Ali Majboor and His Village_Pankaj Rishi Kumar_ 2001
• Photos of the archival collection of Abdul Gan
• Interview with with the local photo studio owner_2005
• Logistic of perception_images from conflict zones_2008
• Assorted Clips of Bhand Pather_Pankaj Rishi Kumar_2001