what am i seeing?

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet nisl sed nullam feugiat.

many stories – one silence

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet nisl sed nullam feugiat.

who am I seeing?

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet nisl sed nullam feugiat.

should I stop here?

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet nisl sed nullam feugiat.

Nunc enim commodo aliquet

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet nisl sed nullam feugiat.

Risus ornare lacinia

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet nisl sed nullam feugiat.

Documentation of Installation -- Door Without Walls from prajna parasher on Vimeo.

Documentation of Installation — Door Without Walls

by Prajna Paramita Parasher and Deb Ellis, 1989 This experimental documentary looks at the life of Manjula Joshi, an Indian woman from the Punjab who works 12 hours a day making poori bread in a Chicago restaurant. Employing competing words, images, and text, addresses women’s roles in traditional culture, the value of women’s labor, the exploitation of immigrant women, and the experience of immigration.

Documentation of Installation -- The Perfect Cleavage from prajna parasher on Vimeo.

Documentation of Installation -- The Perfect Cleavage

Whether in North or South, the national citizen living under world trade decisions and multi-national corporations must respond to forces as distant/immediate and implacable as physical laws. Globalization, a board-room word, fractures exponentially into multiple localizations as what was imagined becomes concrete things created by living workers at almost invisible distance from the banking and distribution systems which order their work. Manufacturing continues its move southwards as money moves north, the uneven warp and weft of this weave obscuring its dangerous pattern within the rich finished cloth.

Trailer -- Unbidden Voices from prajna parasher on Vimeo.

Unbidden Voices

Unbidden Voices [32 mins.] is an experimental documentry about an Indian female kitchen worker on Chicago's Devon street. The video is about the various roles a woman plays as daughter, wife, mother and widow, centering on labor, self and value.

Trailer -- Heiroglyphics of Commodity from prajna parasher on Vimeo.

Trailer — Heiroglyphics of Commodity

by Prajna Paramita Parasher and Deb Ellis, 1989 This experimental documentary looks at the life of Manjula Joshi, an Indian woman from the Punjab who works 12 hours a day making poori bread in a Chicago restaurant. Employing competing words, images, and text, addresses women’s roles in traditional culture, the value of women’s labor, the exploitation of immigrant women, and the experience of immigration.

Documentation of 'The Braille of Naming' projected onto a perforated braille screen from prajna parasher on Vimeo.

The Braille of Naming

A screen using a poem in braille is used to introduce invisibility alongside the visible. The poem itself is about women's story telling through quilting and speaks to the necessity of silence. The inevitability of silence in any transfer of information impels the idiosyncratic into the generalities of speech. Using typographic elements the poem will be projected onto the screen. The inception of this piece began with the idea to work with Braille and to project onto a Braille screen because the project entailed dealing with the necessary but absent silence in any communication process. I first turned to Sandy Sterner’s poem, “Night Work,” that expresses nonverbally the intervals of meaning displayed by the making of a patchwork quilt. The creation of additional electronic sound/images as well as the perforated screen and its Braille legend came next, “Scripta manent, verba volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.” The manipulation and after effects gives visual shape to the words and the sound design as well as creating the perforations onto the screen create a finished quilt, a final project that is both familiar and a surprise.