nupur mathur
We Will Have Always Seen More Than You Try to Hide
Natural Desire

Publications


©2025 Nupur Mathur
We Will Have Always Seen More Than You Try To Hide

(Work in Progress)
Archival documents, participatory workshops, film clips, zines and posters

All films in India have to go through the Central board of Film Certification (CBFC) before they can be shown to the public. Since 1918 the apparatus of film censorship has been contiously evolving.  Most early films, especially from the silent era have been destroyed due to fires or neglect and remarkably what remains are the descriptions of scenes the public never saw.  The artist has collected hundreds of written descriptions of deleted scenes from the 1920s onwards by accessing government archives in India.

The ongoing project explores state-sponsored film censorship in relation to artistic freedom, desire, and resistance. The artist sees cinema and fiction in particular, as a way to imagine other worlds that allow us to play out desires amongst and with different publics.  Titled ‘We Will Have Always Seen More Than You Try to Hide’, the work is rooted in archival research and uses cinematic language to invoke a liberatory imagination.

Using creative scriptwriting and storyboarding as a method to activate the archive as a site for speculation, the artist invites the public to respond to archival records by collaboratively scripting and storyboarding fictional scenes of collective resistance.