13/05/2026
On May 2, Nupur Mathur conducted a workshop at the Reading Room, looking at the language of official censorship mandates and the ways in which such words and judgements shape the morality of our imagination and times. Participants engaged in exercises including filling in the blanks of censored scenes and writing scripts with the potential to be most heavily censored, ranging from the speculative to the absurd, pulpy to mysterious.
This was followed on the 7th by the screening of the film ‘When the Towel Drops’, along with a presentation by Nupur, where she spoke to us about her work including long-term collaborations, her ongoing research on censorship in India, as well as her involvement with people’s movements, workers’ organisations and social impact work all of which inform one another.
Made by the collective Radha May consisting of Nupur, Elisa Giardina Papa, and Bathsheba Okwenje ‘When the Towel Drops’ emerges from their visit to the national censorship archive at the Cineteca di Bologna, in Italy. First presented as a solo exhibition and performance at the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, Brown University in 2015, the video installation has since evolved within other exhibitionary contexts, allowing for the collective to also share their research in different ways, as widely as they can.
Through a material cultural reading, we looked at different sources from which censorship discourse was being produced—film magazines, committee reports, and official internal documents not intended for public circulation, but also cinema as the public realm within which certain identities, ideologies, desires, and power were being negotiated. Within this discursive matrix, Nupur was interested in probing the slippery points and subversive possibilities of silences and absences that appear when archives are stretched across time. She examined the anxiety and tension that gets produced between censorship’s impulse to control how the public sees and the act of collective witnessing at the cinema, where the implication that we have all witnessed something together can feel inherently threatening to certain ideological agendas.
