Locating the impulse for archiving social histories, this panel looks at three positions — the personal, the curatorial, and the artistic — as entry points into engaging with historical material. How do we look towards personal archives to reveal the formation of social movements? How can collective histories offer references for political action that may help us situate the contemporary moment? What does it mean to make visible that which was left purposefully hidden to be found at a later time? Images are never static, but shift in meaning, in time, and in adjacency. This conversation looks at the potential of reading history through the lens of the lost and found.
Archiving Otherwise
Diwas Raja KC (Nepal Picture Library), Naeem Mohaiemen, Maryam Rahman (Estate of Lala Rukh), and Sneha Ragavan (Asia Art Archive) in conversation with Tanvi Mishra
Tanvi Mishra
Tanvi Mishra works with images as a photo editor, curator, writer, and educator. Her areas of interest include rights and representation in image-making, refusal as a visual strategy, and the notion of truth/fiction in photography.
Her recent curatorial projects include the group show “Moving Definitions: An Invitation to Re-view” at Rencontres d’Arles (2023), France, and solo presentations of Divya Cowasji at Serendipity Arts Festival, India (2025), Isadora Romero at Musee Neimenster, Luxembourg (2025), and Photo Kathmandu, Nepal (2025). She was also the Creative Director of The Caravan and part of the editorial team at PIX, a South Asian publication and display practice. Mishra was an invited curator at Photo Kathmandu (2016) and the Breda Photo biennial (2022), and was involved in the curatorial team of Delhi Photo Festival (2013, 2015). Her writing has been published widely, including contributions in FOAM Magazine, NO NIIN Magazine, 1000 Words, Aperture, and the Routledge Companion to Global Photographies (2025). She has taught with photo.circle, Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, the International Center of Photography, and VII Academy, conducting independent workshops on publishing as practice.
Mishra’s work across curating, writing, and editing is premised on the intersection of politics, culture, and social justice. Her working method foregrounds building kinship and solidarity, as tools to imagine alternate, reparative futures collectively.
Naeem Mohaiemen
Naeem Mohaiemen combines films, photography, and essays to research socialist utopias, malleable borders, and fragile families. In Bangladesh, he exhibited at Chobi Mela, Bengal Shilpalay, Abdur Razzaque Foundation, Latitude Longitude, Dhaka Art Summit, Asiatic Society, Gallery Chitrak, Bishaud Bangla, Mangalbarer Shabha, Bengal Architecture Symposium, Dhaka University, Jahangirnagar University, and Zahid Raihan Film Club.He is the editor of Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism (2010), and author of Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (2014), Midnight’s Third Child (2023), Baksho Rohoshyo (2024), and Bengal Photography’s Reality Quest (2025). British Council recently launched Midnight’s Third Child, a curatorial project on Bangladeshi arts as a “third space” by Kehkasha Sabah and Benjamin Cook, inspired by Mohaiemen’s book. Mohaiemen is also the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Visual Arts at Columbia University, New York.
Sneha Ragavan
Sneha Ragavan is a Senior Researcher and Projects Lead for Asia Art Archive in India, based in New Delhi. She conceptualises and leads AAA-I’s research initiatives on modern and contemporary art, including projects that digitise artist archives, develop multilingual digital bibliographies, co-edit a forthcoming three-volume publication on 20th century art writing from the region, and organise seminars and workshops on archiving and art history with colleagues.Sneha holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, for her work on the discourse of the national modern in 20th century architecture in India.
Diwas Raja Kc
Diwas Raja Kc is a researcher, writer, and curator based in Kathmandu. He pursued graduate studies in Visual Culture and History at Sarah Lawrence College, New York, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. At Nepal Picture Library, he works on building visual archives and presenting documentary images of historically obscured subjects. His curatorial show Dalit: A Quest for Dignity (2016) explored ways of witnessing, assertions, and obfuscations about Dalit history in Nepal. Diwas also works as a documentary film editor and has worked with several renowned artists and visual anthropologists. He also conducts workshops in visual storytelling and has taught courses on social history and historiographical methods.
Maryam Rahman
Maryam Rahman is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work ranges from video, installation, public art intervention, sound, photography, montage, and drawing. She has a particular affinity with drawing as a thinking tool, a direct mode of expression in which the drawing medium becomes an extension of the self as well as an independent and complete formal art discipline.
Maryam is a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and is currently studying the classical art of calligraphy specialization in Nastaliq calligraphy and a Master’s in Art Education. She currently teaches drawing at the National College of Arts in Lahore, lives in Lahore, and manages the Estate of her late aunt, Lala Rukh.