12 November 2025 | Kunsthal Gent: Screenings and debate with curator-filmmaker Harsha Vinay and GCSAS’s team

ARTS, RELIGIONS AND LIVING TRADITIONS OF INDIA: FILM SCREENINGS AND CONVERSATION WITH HARSHA VINAY

Kunsthal Gent opens its doors to the Ghent Centre for South Asian Studies (GCSAS) and to filmmaker and exhibition curator Harsha Vinay for an evening exploring the vibrant artistic, cultural, and religious landscapes of South Asia.

Through three short documentaries, Vinay guides us on a cinematic journey across India, portraying living traditions that shape communities and artistic expressions.

The screenings will be followed by an open discussion to delve into how heritage and religion intertwine in India, and how multimedia documentation can preserve and reinterpret fading cultural traditions within and beyond South Asia.

Time & venue

Mirrors of Malabar
2019

Produced for the Museum Rietberg’s exhibition THE MIRROR – Our Reflected Self (2019) and subsequently screened internationally, Mirrors of Malabar document the making and ritual use of mirrors in worship and possession practices of coastal Kerala (southwestern India).

 

Short Films for Being Jain. Art and Culture of an Indian Religion
2022

Originally made for the Museum Rietberg’s exhibition Being Jain. Art and Culture of an Indian Religion (2022-2023), these short films explore key aspects of ritual and material culture within Jainism — including pilgrimage, asceticism, manuscript traditions, ritual death, and everyday lay practices — and have since been screened across the USA, Europe, and India.

 

Portrait of a Cloud. Mindscape of an Indian miniature artist
2025

This film documents the making of the contemporary Ragamala painting ‘Raga Megha’, highlighting the intricacies and nuances of this refined art form. Interwoven with the creative process is the story of Manish Soni, an artist from Rajasthan who began painting miniatures at the age of 21. The film was produced for the Museum Rietberg’s exhibition Ragamala. Pictures for all the senses (2025), which recently concluded.

 

Guest speaker’s bio

Harsha Vinay is the Founder Director of Green Barbet Ltd, India, with over ten years’ experience in curating exhibitions for international museums, cultural programming, administering an artist residency, production of research publications and documentary films.

Harsha holds an MA from the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and a BFA in Painting from College of Fine Art, Bangalore. From 2013 to 2015 he worked at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bangalore, as Assistant Curator in-charge of exhibitions, programmes and outreach. Prior to this he was the ‘Specialist Writer & Subject Expert’ on the curatorial team of the ICCR sponsored exhibition ‘The Body in Indian Art and Thought’, Bruxelles 2013. Here, Harsha was entrusted with research and collation of documentary films from the archives of the IGNCA and Sangeet Natak Akademi on the living traditions of India.

In 2016, Harsha Vinay moved to Varanasi as Director of the Alice Boner Institute, a residency space for academic and artistic research founded to keep alive the legacy of Swiss artist and scholar Padma Bhushan Dr. Alice Boner. Here he organised artist residencies, exhibitions, symposiums, and cultural events with a range of international institutions.

In 2018, Harsha started his own cultural enterprise in Bangalore – ‘Green Barbet: a company for art and culture in South Asia‘, which provides consultancy and advisory services for museums and cultural organisations within and outside India. Under the aegis of this company, Harsha Vinay has co-curated and collaborated on large exhibitions at Museum Rietberg, including ‘Alice Boner – Artist and Scholar’, 2015-18, ‘Mirror – The Reflected Self’, 2018-19, ‘Being Jain: Art and Culture of an Indian Religion’, 2022-23 and more recently ‘Ragamala – Pictures for all the Senses‘, 2024-25.

Harsha has organised numerous international programmes such as Dialogues on Alice Boner Symposium, January 2018, large public events and workshops in Zurich and Varanasi for a diverse audience. Harsha is co-editor of the publication series Alice Boner Dialogues, initiated in 2020. His experience includes facilitating exchange workshops for traditional artisans for the Crafts Council of India, Chennai and documenting craft traditions of Varanasi through short demonstrational videos by artisans. His interests also extend to art education, capacity building and integrating communities with museum spaces.

Harsha lives and works between Varanasi and Bangalore.

 

 

Developed in continuity with the Internationalisation@Home session at Ghent University on 12/11/2025, this event is organised in collaboration with Museum Rietberg (Zurich), Green Barbet Ltd (India), GBF Foundation for Cooperative Research on South Asian Art and Artists, and Kunsthal Gent. Funded by the Department of Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Ghent University, and FWO (Odysseus Type II grant: “The Mosques of Kerala. Artistic Vocabularies in the Identity-Building of Muslim Communities”).