Our Eyes as Commonly Tender: Visual Justice in the Filmmaking of Pratibha Parmar

September 2025, English, full color, softcover
Design: Sming Sming Books

COMING SOON

Our Eyes as Commonly Tender: Visual Justice in the Filmmaking of Pratibha Parmar

Pratibha Parmar’s films have shaped the politics of feminist, queer, and diasporic visual cultures for over four decades. From experimental shorts to activist documentaries and feature-length works, Parmar’s cinematic language operates as an act of visual justice. Her practice engages the image as a site of struggle—challenging the power relations that determine who is seen, how they are represented, and what forms of visual expression are made possible. Her films are a site of narrative transformation, where memory, activism, and artistic expression converge to resist erasure and imagine new futures.

This book accompanies a season of Pratibha Parmar’s films at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London as part of the Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985–2025 celebration curated by artist Lubaina Himid.

Edited by Nydia A Swaby, the book features contributions from Rebecca Close, Lynnée Denise, Gayatri Gopinath, Lubaina Himid, Nazmia Jamal, Alina Khakoo, Shamira Meghani, Lola Olufemi, Lucy Reynolds, and Nydia A. Swaby.