Dis-Ease
2018 | English | 8 minutes 45 seconds | United States
The short version of DIS-EASE looks at the metaphors we use to describe illnesses, and how some diseases become metaphors to describe other phenomena. In particular, it examines the metaphor of the "war on disease," and asks how it affects how we treat people who are sick, how we define the "public" in public health, and whether it has locked us into militarized national security paradigms for both responding to current epidemic diseases and planning for future pandemics.
The screening of this film was followed by a discussion between the filmmaker Mariam Ghani and cultural theorist Rashmi Sawhney.
About the Filmmaker
Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her work looks at places, spaces and moments where social, political and cultural structures take on visible forms, and spans multiple disciplines. Her films have screened at the Berlinale, Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, DOC NYC, Sheffield Doc/Fest, SFFILM, Ann Arbor, FIDBA, and Il Cinema Ritrovato, among other festivals. Her work has also been exhibited and screened at the Guggenheim, MoMA, Met Breuer and Queens Museum in New York, and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the CCCB in Barcelona, the Sharjah, Lahore, and Liverpool Biennials, the Dhaka Art Summit, and Documenta 13 in Kabul and Kassel, among others.
About the Cultural Theorist
Rashmi Sawhney is a Bangalore-based cultural theorist and associate professor in Film and Cultural Studies at Christ University. She writes on cinema and the visual arts and is co-founder with Lucia Imaz King, of VisionMix (www.visionmix.info), an international network of artists, filmmakers and researchers. Curatorial projects include: Future Orbits and Video Vortex XI, both as collaterals of the 2017 Kochi Muziris Biennial; Set.Reset on ‘Cinema and Labour’ at The House of Inquiry, Goa, 2018; and Loss and Transience, Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei, March-May 2021. Recent edited volumes include: Women at Work: the Cultural and Creative Industries (2020) & The Moving Image: South Asian Trajectories (2018).
