Join us for a two-part programme exploring the world of video games by artist Afrah Shafiq conceptualised around the ongoing exhibition ‘Very Small Feelings.’

Interactive Playthrough
Deep dive into a sea of gorgeously illustrated children's stories that travelled from the Soviet Union to India during the Cold War with an interactive playthrough of archival video game Nobody Knows For Certain by artist Afrah Shafiq. Suitable for ages 10 and up. Limited Seat

A Conversation: Reading Games, Playing Books
Join Artist Afrah Shafiq and Professor Dr Souvik Mukherjee as they talk about an expansive interpretation of video games, the act of play beyond the idea of winning or losing, and the potential of interactive formats for narratives, documentary and research. Apart from talking about their own relationship with games and sharing snippets from some of their favourite games, the conversation will also touch upon Dr Souvik Mukherjee's book on Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books and Afrah Shafiq's interactive archival game Nobody Knows For Certain that is currently on display at KNMA as part of the exhibition Very Small Feelings.

Afrah Shafiq is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Goa, India. Her work takes hybrid forms that bring together text, sound, animation, code, and sculpture to create interactive, sometimes simulated atmospheres to experience and unlearn. She often seeks ways to retain the tactile within the digital and the poetry within technology. Afrah’s work has been included in the Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh, 2023; Video Art Pavilion at the Asian Art Biennale, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2022; Lahore Biennial (LB02), Lahore Pakistan; 2019; Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India, 2018, WorldBuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist At Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf and Centre Pompidou-Metz; “Very Small Feelings” at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, among other exhibitions in India and abroad. Afrah is currently a fellow with the VM Salgaocar Fellowship Grants 2022 at the Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts.

Dr Souvik Mukherjee is assistant professor in Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta, India. Souvik’s research looks at videogames as storytelling media through a broad spectrum of topics in Game Studies ranging from postcolonialism, identity and temporality in videogames to videogame cultures in South-East Asia. Souvik is the author of three monographs, Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back (Springer UK 2017) and Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent: Development, Culture(s) and Representations (Bloomsbury India 2022) and is currently working on a book project on Indian board games and colonialism.

His other interests are (the) Digital Humanities, Poststructuralist theory, Posthumanism and Early Modern Literature. His databases on the Dutch Cemetery at Chinsurah, the Scottish Cemetery in Kolkata and the nineteenth-century Bengali industrialist, Mutty Lall Seal are all available open-access. He is currently an elected board-member of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) and a founder-member of DHARTI, the Digital Humanities group in India. Souvik has been named a Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) Distinguished Scholar in 2019 and a Higher Education Video Game Alliance (HEVGA) fellow in 2022. He is also an affiliated senior research fellow at the Centre of Excellence, Game Studies at the University of Tampere.