In Person: Live with Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam

Shadow Circus: A Personal Archive of Tibetan Resistance (1957–1974) is a project by Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam in collaboration with Natasha Ginwala, currently on view at India International Centre, Delhi. The exhibition re-evaluates the audiovisual material that Sarin and Sonam gathered over the years by weaving in Lhamo Tsering’s extensive personal archive of documents, letters, photographs and surveillance maps, along with a remastered version of their documentary The Shadow Circus: The CIA in Tibet (1998), to create a more complete and complex mosaic of a still largely obscure story. The Cold War epoch is navigated within a third space as an uneasy alliance beyond geopolitical power blocs and bilateral relations to examine forms of intelligence-gathering, guerrilla warfare and clandestine resistance in Tibet that continues to resonate today as part of an unfinished project of freedom.

In this walk-through with Sonam and Sarin, they speak about their research process, the Tibetan Resistance in the context of the Cold War and the personal archive generated from an underground resistance movement. Indian-Tibetan filmmakers and artists Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam have been working together for more than thirty years. Their work includes award-winning films and art installations. Their documentary, The Sun Behind the Clouds (2009), won the Vaclav Havel Award at the One World Film Festival in Prague. Their Tibetan-language feature films, Dreaming Lhasa (2005) and The Sweet Requiem (2018) premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. They are also the directors of the Dharamshala International Film Festival, which they founded in 2012.

^{(Featured Image: Installation view of Shadow Circus: A Personal Archive of Tibetan Resistance (1957–1974) at the India International Centre, Delhi. Courtesy of Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam.)}

Recorded on 29 April 2022. 

To read more about Lhamo Tsering's archive, please click here and here.

In case you missed the previous episodes of In Person, you can watch them here, here, and here.