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

Institute of Contemporary Arts & Sming Sming Books, 2025, Softcover, 148 pages, 17.8 x 22.9 cm

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.

Co-edited by Nydia A. Swaby and Pratibha Parmar, the book features contributions from Rebecca Close, Lynnée Denise, Gayatri Gopinath, Lubaina Himid, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Alina Khakoo, Shamira Meghani, Lola Olufemi, Lucy Reynolds, and Nydia A. Swaby.

"Pratibha Parmar’s feminist film work spans four decades and is at the centre of this beautiful and necessary collection. Our Eyes as Commonly Tender is both a record of and an invitation to be immersed in Parmar’s ongoing aesthetic political practice—to enter and be changed by her ‘visual language.’  I am so glad to see this book enter the world." —Christina Sharpe

Pratibha Parmar was born in Nairobi, Kenya and grew up in London. Her films have been broadcast on television, exhibited at international film festivals, and shown in gallery spaces around the world. Parmar has been a Visiting Artist at Stanford University and taught film as an Associate Professor at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. She is a member of the Directors Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. For a full list of her films, awards, and published works, please visit her website: pratibhaparmar.com.