Yugantar Film Collective Screening
Part of 'There Are No Honest Poems About Dead Women: Jemma Desai'
A screening of Yugantar Film Collective's 'Molkarin' and 'Idi Katha Maatramena' followed by readings and conversation between Jemma Desai and Alia Syed, moderated by Mason Leaver-Yap
Content warning: This event contains references to domestic and sexual abuse, suicide, and police brutality. Viewer discretion is advised.
| Dates | 10 Sep 2026 |
| Times | 6:45pm–9pm |
| Space | Screening Room South Wing |
| Price | Free |
Artists in Residence
This screening brings together two films made by the Yugantar Film Collective in India in the early 1980s. Molkarin (Maid Servant) was developed with domestic workers in Pune and attends to their labour, dignity, collective organisation and resistance to the feudal relations embedded within domestic work. Idi Katha Maatramena (Is This Just a Story?) draws closely on women’s testimony to explore marriage, reproductive labour and the constraints of domestic life, moving between fiction and lived experience.
Both films appear within Jemma Desai’s G31 exhibition There Are No Honest Poems About Dead Women, where they enter into a wider constellation of voices, songs and images concerned with feminist coalition, inheritance and relation across the intimate and the political. Here, they will be screened in full, followed by readings from the accompanying publication I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got / I Said I Loved You and I Wanted and a conversation with filmmaker Alia Syed, who collaborated closely with Desai on the exhibition. The conversation will be moderated by Mason Leaver-Yap, editor of the publication.
Designed by artist Rose Nordin, the publication is made of fragments, gathered voices, songs and refusals. Across conversations, poems, notes, memories and images, it traces what passes between mothers and daughters, and what might still be written when nothing can quite be received.
Content warning: These films contain references to domestic and sexual abuse, suicide, and police brutality. Viewer discretion is advised.
Biography
Jemma Desai
Jemma Desai is a writer, convener and artist working across film, performance and visual arts. Through video, poetry, performance writing and collage, her practice explores forms of gathering, assemblage and circulation: of voices, bodies, images, ideas and ways of knowing across difference. Drawing on decolonial, black feminist and abolitionist thought, she is interested in artistic form as both an aesthetic and embodied social practice, and in the conditions through which culture is made, shared and received. These questions underpin her practice-based doctoral research, which explores abolitionist praxis as form and infrastructure in cultural production.
Alia Syed
Alia Syed is an experimental film maker whose work has been shown extensively in cinemas and galleries around the world. She is interested in story telling: the protean nature of self-narration, enfolding fact and fiction, how histories are made and unmade, especially in relation to culture, diaspora and location.
Mason Leaver-Yap
Mason Leaver-Yap works with artists to produce publications, exhibitions, and events. He has recently been working with Alexis Kyle Mitchell, Jasleen Kaur, Alia Syed, P. Staff, Lisette May Monroe, Constantin Thun, Stefanie Heinze, Ingrid Pollard, Winnie Herbstein, Renée Green, James Richards, Ima-Abasi Okon, Phil Collins and Basyma Saad.