Visual Cultural Studies

A Lens on Memory, Space, and Society

At SAFAR, Visual Cultural Studies examines how images—still and moving—capture, critique, and archive the lived experiences, rituals, histories, and imaginations of South Asia. This platform brings together photographic archives and documentary films produced or curated by SAFAR scholars as part of ongoing research into culture, aesthetics, spatiality, memory, and justice.

By foregrounding visual forms, this space expands the academic vocabulary of South Asian studies beyond the textual, offering layered insights into the seen, the remembered, and the performed.

Witnessing South Asia: A Visual Archive

SAFAR houses a growing collection of thousands of photographs from field visits, workshops, exhibitions, and everyday life across Nepal, Bangladesh, and India. These images serve as both visual field notes and aesthetic testimony to cultural practices, gendered spaces, architectural heritage, and vernacular expression.

Ringing Aloud, Keeping Memories
Keep Walking On
Towards Infinite Mokshya
Mothers Love
God Within, Without
Structures of Modernity
Tradition Continues
My Boat, Our Memories
My Ornaments, My Mnemesis

Documentaries

Documentaries

These documentaries are part of SAFAR’s mission to narrate South Asian realities not just through theory but through moving image, orality, and spatial storytelling. Each film explores a facet of public memory, urban texture, or political imagination, inviting viewers to reflect on the connections between image and ideology.

Featured Films:

Art of the Lake (2014)

Concept & Host: Dr. Arun Gupto
DOP: Salil Subedi
A poetic journey into lakeside visual culture and sacred spaces in Pokhara.

Art and the City (2022)


Concept & Host: Dr. Arun Gupto
DOP: Renuka Khatiwada
Investigates urban Kathmandu’s art, architecture, and spiritual geometry.

Anger and the Mahatma (2023)

Concept & Host: Dr. Arun Gupto
DOP: Renuka Khatiwada
A philosophical meditation on political anger, Gandhian resistance, and their symbolic meanings in Nepal’s present.