Friday, 30th October 2020
6pm IST

The webinar will be held on the online platform Zoom. To register for the webinar please click on the link below:

About the work Cups of nun chai :
Cups of nun chai records the sharing of one hundred and eighteen cups of nun chai, and just as many conversations. Each cup was a part of a growing memorial for one hundred and eighteen civilians killed in the protests that shook the Kashmir valley during the summer of 2010.  

In these exchanges the political unfolds through a profoundly personal experience, and events, places and sentiments that are often obscured from view are given breathing space. People, homes, memory—and flavour—combine to make tangible what so many outside Kashmir do not know. 

This is an archive of small moments, marking each loss and moving against the normalisation of political violence and death. Spanning the spheres of contemporary art, literature, social-science and journalism, Cups of nun chai is a poignant act of memorialisation—a means of remembering, reading and reminding. 

Adroit, and shot through with an extraordinary, even stubborn, compassion, it reflects on Kashmir, but also on nation-making and colonisation, and on power and violence. The histories, political forces and grief behind this work emerge gradually, but with great sensitivity. And eventually with an unexpected degree of ferocity. 

About the photographer :
Alana Hunt is an artist and writer who lives on Miriwoong country in the north-west of Australia. This and her long-standing relationship with South Asia—and with Kashmir in particular—shapes her engagement with the violence that results from the fragility of nations and the aspirations and failures of colonial dreams.

Alana studied in Sydney, Halifax and New Delhi, and since 2009 she has led several award-winning art and publishing projects. These have circulated in the Hansard Report of the Australian Parliament, as a reading in the history department of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, as a newspaper serial in Srinagar, Kashmir, and as an unofficial street sign at the base of Australia’s most under-utilised dam wall.

In late 2020 Alana will publish her decade long body of work Cups of nun chai (2010-present) with Yaarbal Books.

About the Publisher :
Yaarbal is the book imprint of the New Delhi based Octave Communications, led by film-maker and writer Sanjay Kak.
It takes its name from a Kashmiri word for a riverbank, and suggests a place of conviviality, where conversations can take place.It’s logo, a bold Y integrated with a slingshot, is a fair representation of its intentions: resourceful and resolute, at once toy and weapon.
Yaarbal’s first title, the 2017 photobook Witness – Kashmir 1986-2016 / 9 Photographers was listed in New York Times Magazine’s year-end list of Best Photo Books of 2017.

The Guftgu Series have been facilitated and supported by Pro-Helvetia New Delhi’s Now On Grant for the year 2020.

All text provided by Alana Hunt and Yaarbal Books. Images © Alana Hunt. Alana’s Portrait by Ben Lindberg