Radicle City: Snapshots of Bangalore

Arjuna Keshvani-Ham

October 30 to November 23, 2024

Presented as an installation in the Deluge space, Radicle City is a cinematic essay which imagines a future in which Bangalore’s gardens no longer exist. Narrated as a poetic address by a voice who has grown up in a city without trees, the work’s hybrid documentary and fictional narrative recovers and reinterprets footage of an unknown walker’s journey along a park that marks an old line of colonial segregation in the city. This is an old border with new lines: today the city is India’s “silicon valley,” an IT hub at the heart of a network of global capitalism, an incubator for the apparatuses of Modi’s digital technocracy and one of India’s most unequal and divided cities. Moving restlessly back and forth between past and possible future, the film is at once an investigation into the city’s complex colonial entanglements and their afterlives, and an elegy to the city’s gardens, fragile spaces of resistance in a metropolis which threatens their destruction.

This film features the voice of Suresh Jayaram, a visual artist, historian and curator based in Bangalore, India. The film was made possible with the support of Artcore Gallery, Derby UK and 1 Shanthi Road Gallery, Bangalore India. 

Arjuna Keshvani-Ham is a British-Canadian-Indian writer, filmmaker and videojournalist. She received her BA in English and German at the University of Oxford (2021) and MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art (2023).

Arjuna’s work uses speculative nonfiction to address themes of memory, erasure, (neo)colonial violence and the spatial politics of exile.

Arjuna’s films and installations have been exhibited internationally at festivals and exhibitions, including at the Tate Modern (London), Antimatter Media Art (BC, Canada), VCAS (Vienna), Belvedere 21 (Vienna), SET film festival (London), Deluge Contemporary Art (Canada), Artcore Gallery (Derby), the Royal College of Art (London). In 2024 she was selected for an international residency with 1 Shanthi Road Gallery (Bengaluru) and Artcore Gallery (Derby). In 2022 Arjuna collaborated with EUROCLIO and the University of Oxford to produce a series of short documentaries on the enduring legacies of Portugal’s entanglements with the slave trade. Her writing has been featured in international publications such as Flaneur Magazine, The Pluralist and Oxford Review of Books.

Arjuna was awarded the ASC free studio award for emerging artists in London (2024).