Multidisciplinary artist Anamika Singh’s short documentary on leftist Indian newspaper Jan Morcha screens twice at the Chazen in June alongside her multimedia gallery exhibition “Corpus.”
Among Madison cinephiles, the Chazen Museum of Art auditorium is not typically thought of as a space reserved for screening short documentary work. But that is slowly changing. This past April, the Wisconsin Film Festival chose the venue to present two programs of shorts with local ties: “Portraits” and “Fire, Water, Stickball, and Dinosaurs.”
On April 20, multidisciplinary artist and recent MFA graduate of UW–Madison, Anamika Singh, also hosted the world premiere of Sheetla (2025) in that very auditorium, which screened in conjunction with her Corpus exhibition that opened on April 7 in the second floor’s Leslie and Johanna Garfield Galleries. Since the 22-minute film’s unveiling, the Chazen has offered subsequent encore screenings in May, and those continue in June—on Sunday, June 14, at 1:30 p.m. and on Wednesday, June 25, at 5 p.m.—before the closure of Singh’s exhibition on July 13.
Sheetla is really only a short in terms of duration. The real-life stories it chronicles in the twin cities of Faizabad and Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh (in Northern India, with a population of 240 million) have the weight of a feature film. Titled after Singh’s late grand-uncle, Sheetla Singh, a longtime journalist and union leader who died in 2023, the film showcases journalism’s role in upholding the tenets of democracy against government and majority-party disinformation. Essential reporting is channeled through the cooperative daily newspaper Jan Morcha (People’s Front), which has been in circulation since the late 1950s. (These themes echo in the struggles of the modern Khabar Lahariya paper that filmmakers Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas depict in their 2021 doc, Writing With Fire, about a female collective of journalists in Uttar Pradesh.)
Singh’s artist statement on the left-hand wall of the duskily lit Chazen gallery entrance cites Jan Morcha‘s role in recalling “the historiography of communal violence.” The act of documentation in itself has the power to break propagandist narratives. Here, it’s the December 1992 desecration and demolition of the Babri Mosque by ring-wing Hindu nationalists, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP). They believed the Mosque itself was erected on the birth site of the deity Rama, and thus the historic Muslim site of worship needed to be leveled for a Hindu temple by any means necessary. The nationalists incited riots and widespread violence.
However, Singh’s work is not about professorially retracing all this context for Westerners distanced from these events. Archival footage of this demolition is not shown in Sheetla, though it was obviously an inspiration for the artistic process. Rather, Singh records her own footage from this decade of “ongoing construction and temple megaprojects taken up by the state and their historical implications in revising the complex history of the Indian subcontinent,” she explains in an email response to Tone Madison.