In the Eye of a Dream (2025) is an immersive cinematic installation by Kinnari Saraiya, combining live action, classical Indian soundscapes, and Kathak-inspired movement to visualise dreamscapes drawn from a colonial archive at the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Saraiya comes from a long line of female kathakaars, meaning one who tells stories. Kathak, a classical North Indian dance form, carries narrative through rhythm, gesture, and repetition; spins, footwork, expression, story held in the body. Its movements, traditionally drawn from Indian epics such as the Mahabharata, Ramayana and Bhagavata Purana, continue to evolve today; contemporary political life held not as illustration, but as transmission.
Featuring mythological beings, In the Eye of a Dream is a decolonial critique of the dream archive of Charles Gabriel Seligman (1873–1940), a leading anthropologist at the London School of Economics. Convinced that dreams might reveal hidden truths, Seligman gathered hundreds of them from colonial subjects across Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, hoping to map the psychic structure of empire.
In the early 20th century, as resistance intensified across the British colonies, anthropology became an affective tool of governance, producing categories that organised colonised life, exploited labour, and contained dissent; designating certain groups as “martial races” for military use, while recording practices such as barefoot dance as primitive, producing cultural and racial inferiority as an emotional condition to be exploited.
But Seligman’s attempt to map dreams as data never held. The dreams did not resolve into a system. They slipped. They resisted. They carried something else; ancestral signals, instructions, fragments from a pluriverse of worlds. What remains is empty; dream records stripped of their predictive force as omens, flattened into data. A failed interface.
Kinnari Saraiya’s filmic installation unfolds across two interactive chapters, navigated through embroidered controllers. These are not neutral devices. They ask for touch, rhythm, repetition. They think through the body. By changing the very structure through which the archive is encountered, dreams are no longer treated as interior content but begin to bleed into the real. Saraiya stages a form of poetic activism; movements across bodies, land, and time. Decolonisation, Kathak-told; not illustrative but embodied and operative.