Sleepwalker Archives: Film and Cyanotype Workshop by Karthik Subramanian

Worshop + Film screening|Travelling Plants

Alliance Française de Bangalore
Language English
Price Free

Sleepwalker Archives: Cyanotype Workshop

Cyanotype is an image making process that belongs to the formative times of the birth of the medium of photography. The process is surely an exercise in chemical precision but also one in slowness. At a time when making photographs has become so easy and so fast, what does it mean to make images with a process that is slow, and in collaboration with light from the sun.

In this workshop, the participants get to make cyanotype prints hands-on, guided by the sensorial possibilities that the entire process allows for us to conjure an image. This will also be an exercise in listening, feeling and thinking through image making.

At a time that is saturated with photographs and hyper-real colour images, by creating monochromatic images in varying shades of ‘blue’ can we discover something about the very nature of seeing itself?

Date & Timing: 18.10.2025, 1:30 pm – 3:30 pm
Location: Terrace, Alliance Française de Bangalore
Limited to 25 participants: Register here.

Sleepwalker Archives - A Film screening

A photographer, while walking from the estuary to the source of the waterless Kaveri river, abandons his journey after encountering a woman whose image could not be recorded by his camera. Six years after dismissing that occurrence as a malady of the summer heat, he finds a note left behind in a photo archive about the very same woman. He begins another journey in search of that woman, following the scent of absence in the photographs of the archive.

As a child, Karthik Subramanian travelled frequently between his life in the city and his grandparents' in the village - learning to experience the world as it moves through the window of a train. When he later travelled to photograph the place where the river Ganga joins the Bay of Bengal, the lament of the shifting land in front of him mixed inseparably with the half remembered memories of the landscape through the moving windows. At this slippery edge between water and land, began Karthik’s preoccupation with still and moving images; culture and ecology; history and mythology; the end and the beginning.

Entry free!

The Sleep Walkers Archives is a collaboration between India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) under its Archives and Museums programme, and the French Institute Pondicherry with Karthik Subramanian and this event is made possible in association with India Foundation for the Arts (IFA).