Black Kite as Method by Swati ARORA | MaCI - Université Grenoble Alpes

GATES, Performance, Projection / Recherche

Le 2 juin 2026

This talk by Swati ARORA from Queen Mary University of London and GATES Fellow explores postcolonial Delhi through the flight of black kites in Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes (2022), examining urban space, vulnerability, and the politics of life and death.

India will mark 80 years of freedom from the British colonial rule on 15 August 2026. As the postcolony celebrates another temporal milestone, the talk interrogates the contemporary remnants of the event through a spatial lens by focussing on Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes (2022) – a story about Delhi where the slow-moving camera follows black kites in the sky with patience and tenderness. Following the camera’s gaze, she reads the urban through these avian creatures with beady eyes. What spatial reading of postcolonial Delhi emerges when we look up? Working with this vertical scale, she tracks the flight of the black kite as a meditation on the politics of life and death. The discussion pivots around attention to bodies made prone to injury, forcing a reckoning with the shadows of social life of Delhi.

This is part of her forthcoming monograph which reads the urban public space in postcolonial Delhi through aesthetic practices, archival traces, nonhuman creatures, and embodied experiences.

Swati Arora is Senior Lecturer in Performance and Global South Studies at Queen Mary University of London. Her work thinks with minoritarian performance and visual culture, transnational feminisms, and de-post/colonial politics. Across her research, writing and pedagogy, she is curious about how different aesthetic practices diffract colonial and imperial histories, epistemologies, and their corresponding debris. She is a recipient of Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship for 2025-26 and Early Career Researcher Prize 2024, awarded by the Theatre and Performance Research Association, UK. Prior to joining Queen Mary, she worked at King’s College London. This followed Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships in Visual History and Theory at the Centre for Humanities Research and then at the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, UWC, South Africa, where she remains as a Research Fellow.

Supported by the GATES project (Grenoble ATtractiveness and ExcellenceS), funded by the French government's Programme d'Investissement Avenir and implemented by ANR France 2030

Date

Le 2 juin 2026

4:00pm

Localisation

Maison de la Création et de l'Innovation
Salle de créativité/Creativity Room
Station Gabriel Fauré - MUSE