We are delighted to announce the screening of Walkthrough of the Exhibition, Kaghazi Pairahan: Publishing and Resistance in South Asia, with the curator Akshay Mahajan

Date: 17 May 2025, Saturday
Time: 5.00 pm Onwards

About:
Akshay Mahajan (b. 1985, India) is a curator, photographer, and writer invested in community histories and archival excavation. His curatorial practice is shaped by a deep engagement with visual storytelling, folklore, and alternative publishing, foregrounding how archives—both institutional and informal—shape our understanding of history.

In 2008, he co-founded Blindboys.org, a collective reclaiming public spaces for photography, fostering dialogue around photographic practices beyond institutional frameworks. He also co-curates Goa Familia, an evolving archive of Goan visual and oral histories, and GoaPhoto, an international photography festival that activates the landscape through site-specific installations.

Mahajan’s curatorial projects, including Kaghazi Pairahan, highlight peripheral modes of publishing as acts of artistic resistance. His work considers how historical narratives are constructed, contested, and reimagined through images, texts, and community memory. Through his curatorial and editorial work, he continues to explore how archives can serve as living, evolving spaces of engagement rather than static repositories of the past.

Kaghazi Pairahan, meaning “clothes made of paper”, is a unique exhibition and traveling library of artists’ publications engaging with social and political dissent across South Asia. Featuring photobooks, zines, unpublished dummies, and pamphlets, the exhibition explores publishing as a strategy of resistance—against state violence, caste oppression, patriarchy, environmental degradation, and censorship. Its title recalls an ancient tradition in which individuals seeking justice wore paper garments, a symbolic act of vulnerability transformed into defiance.

For its latest iteration at Arthshila Goa, Kaghazi Pairahan expands its discourse with new works situating protest, citizenship, and memory within contemporary urgencies. The Amchem Mollem collective presents an intervention on community-led efforts to protect Goa’s ecology from destructive infrastructural projects. Nishant Saldanha pays tribute to Goan revolutionary and anti-colonial freedom fighter Libia Lobo Sardesai, illuminating her enduring legacy. Niharika Chauhan’s ‘Second Home’ critiques the proliferation of second homes in Goa and their socio-environmental impact. Krithika Sriram’s ‘Booklet of Banned Objects’ interrogates censorship, exposing shifting boundaries of control. Rajyashri Goody’s ‘Writing Recipes’ entwines culinary traditions with narratives of defiance, revealing everyday resistance. These additions deepen the exhibition’s role as an evolving archive of dissent.
Curated by Devadeep Gupta and Akshay Mahajan and; presented by Editions JOJO.