Kamayani Sharma

I am a writer, podcaster and translator engaging with the humanities and social sciences, with a focus on visual art, culture and media. 

Formerly a text editor with Art India and researcher with Sarai-CSDS, I now develop and manage the audio content programme for Sharjah Art Foundation*. 

I contribute critical and creative writing to publications,  peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes worldwide, including a popular monthly series for Scroll.in. I was an Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation grantee at TAKE On Art Critical Writing Ensemble 2015, Critic-in-Residence at Dharti Arts Residency 2018, a finalist at the International Award for Art Criticism 2020, selected for the Momus Emerging Critics Residency 2021, recipient of the Kalpalata Fellowship 2022 in Visual Culture Writing and winner of the RedInk Award 2023 for print journalism in the Arts. 

I've contributed texts to Focus Photography Festival 2012, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022, and Serendipity Arts Festivals 2018 and 2023. My poetry has appeared in Cha, Fulcrum, Kartika Review, Pratilipi and The Stinging Fly, and in the anthology ‘14 International Younger Poets’ (Arts & Letters, 2021). In February 2024, I curated my first exhibition, Mumkin Zameen at Niv Art Centre, New Delhi. I run South Asia's first independent visual culture podcast - Artaलाप - streaming on all audio apps (Instagram: @art.alaap). 

My translation practice between English and Hindustani spans poetry, prose and art criticism, my first book-length project being a translation of Anu Singh Choudhary's 'Neela Scarf' (HarperCollins India, 2023).


*To listen to the two series I have produced for Sharjah Art Foundation so far, click here and here.




South Asian Gothic Haunted cultures, histories and media, University of Wales Press •

Home Is Where the Horror Is: Pakistani Films and Historical Trauma

There are two broad positions on the matter of representing historical trauma in cinema. On the one hand: that the experience of trauma is so unimaginable that it can never be fully captured. On the other: that a mass medium like film can facilitate a public process of catharsis by interpreting memories of violence and rupture. The genre of the Gothic, defined by the repeated evocation of the past, is appropriate to tackle psychic wounds, both individual and collective. In this paper, I will analyse two Pakistani films made forty years apart – Omar Ali Khan’s Zibahkhana (Hell’s Ground) (2007) and a film that it copiously references, Khwaja Sarfraz’s Zinda Laash (Dracula in Pakistan) (1967) – and look at how the South Asian Gothic addresses historical trauma. In the case of postcolonial narratives , the Other remains a central feature, if not in direct relation to Empire then to its legacy. While it has inherited the aesthetics of its colonial ancestor, the European Gothic, one prominent aspect of the hermeneutics of the South Asian Gothic has to do with the shock and tremors of Partition – a literal Othering from the Self – that continue into the 21st century as congenital and constitutive features of the modern nation-states that it resulted in.
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