‘Infra’ often means ‘below’ a threshold. Here, we engage in conversation or initiate the process, but the authorial impulse disperses and may not coalesce into a single entity. Our practice folds into other practices, developing a stream that converses while moving with its own momentum. The associative density these practices acquire over time remains unscripted.
A cursory glance at the ‘Sarai Readers’ (01 to 09), produced over ten years, shows how they attract authors and artists from across the globe—inner cities, insulated laboratories, hospital intensive care units, and the raging fields of protest. This accumulated layer of voices propels the world around us.
Work 10am-5pm Over a Week, in the Space || Call People for Lunch Discussions if You Want || Develop a Critical Lexicon and Vocabulary for Contemporary Art || Involve More People || Work by Yourself || Work Together With Others || Invite || Perform || Initiate || Create Punctuations || Pair || Make a Set […]
The Sarai Reader 09: Projections sets its stage on dual platforms: the printed Reader and a parallel exhibition at the Devi Art Foundation—inviting ideas and visuals to journey together, sometimes converging, sometimes diverging. More than a catalogue or companion piece, this book creates a roadmap: illuminating questions, amplifying desires, and sparking new lines of inquiry across […]
Modernity once promised liberation from fear. We live amidst mobile populations, hidden terrors, financial tremors, and subtle uncertainties. From the air we breathe to the financial systems we trust, everything is threaded with disclaimers and doubts. Sarai Reader 08 leans into this pervasive anxiety—tracking how floods, riots, and crises expose our fragile infrastructures and inner lives. […]
Sarai Reader 07 argues that borders—political, conceptual, technical—are both passages and barriers. This volume examines how frontiers shape identities, rights, flows, and exclusions. It explores the tension between mobility and control, tracking how technologies of surveillance, documentation, and registration dictate who can pass and who remains invisible. It also reflects on the emotional weight of […]
Sarai Reader 06 takes the fact of a chaotic, turbulent world as a given, and then asks, now what? This Reader places us in the vortex of daily life: tremors, power cuts, agitations rising and fading across streets and airwaves. The preface captures a world where floods, fires, riots, and sudden silences shape an ever-shifting […]
The Sarai Reader 05 looks at “Acts” as instruments of legislation, at things within and outside the law, and at “acts”- as different ways of “doing” things in society and culture. This issue foregrounds the discourse surrounding piracy, borders, surveillance, claims to authority and entitlement, the language of expertise, the legal regulation of sexual behaviour […]
The Sarai Reader 04 takes on open questions to map new territories of thought about media practice. It brings in the question of responsive ways of going media that are not captive to “events and issues” but that actually expands communicative potential in society. The book argues for reclaiming critique, an autonomy of decision against […]
In Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies, technology takes the centre-stage as a multi-faceted constellation of ideas, images, reflections, debates, histories and provocations. The book reframes “technology” not as a distant expert domain but as a lived, contested field. It charts the series’ trajectory from its encounter with free‑software publics to urban infrastructures to ask how […]
The second book in the ‘Sarai Reader’ series takes off from where the first book ends. This text argues to take the urban seriously. It begins by addressing a dearth of city-focused writing in South Asia, asserting that rapid globalisation has propelled urbanism to the forefront of cultural and scholarly discourses. The book positions itself […]
This inaugural volume in Sarai’s reader series explores the layered meanings of the Public Domain through interwoven dialogues, essays, and FAQs. It opens with email exchanges that challenge conventional notions of publicness—moving from physical spaces like bazaars and streets to digital commons and free software culture. Drawing on historical, legal, and vernacular understandings, the text […]
