Agnishikha Ray

Agnishikha (Agni) is a storyteller and filmmaker from India, currently based in London.

In 2019, she graduated with a First Class BA Honours degree in Communication Design from Birmingham City University, UK administered by ICAT Design and Media College, India. During her period of study under BCU, her graduation film Wings won the Best Project award at her graduate show. Additionally, for a collaborative film project called Ta Ta Buy Buy, her team secured the runner up prize at the IPRISM awards, 2018 conducted by ASSOCHAM, India.

Upon graduating, she moved on to work as a production assistant for BOTVFX, India. She has also worked as a freelance storyboard artist and animator at several short projects in India, helping her gain an appreciation for the initial processes of storytelling.

At the Royal College of Art, her MA Animation degree helped her rediscover her position as an artist through playfully experimenting with narrative styles and hands on textures, while using her voice to express her stories.

My animation practice explores the Self through playfulness and poetry.

Through every filmmaking process, I create a safe space to understand and integrate emotional wounds that are burrowed in the shadows. Every film becomes a healing tool.

A strong fascination in autoethnography and involving the 'inner child' to create, is an outcome of my dissertation "An inner-child's expression, in search of authenticity". Since then laying the foundation through inner-self conversational practices before beginning any film, has turned out to be an integral part of the process. From this work, I have rediscovered my interest in poetry writing led by intuition, that further influenced my first year film The Wind Doesn't Whisper To Me. The emphasis on several paper textures in my work provides a tactile and psychotherapeutic environment that sustains the emotional nature of creating these films.

An auto-ethnographic film revolving around a girl’s conversation with fear. It occurs between and across the two sides of the mirror and explores the different responses to fear - fight, flight, freeze, fawn, faint.

“It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”

- D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 6

Mirror as a metaphor, playfully translates my exaggerated childhood fear of seeing my "ghostly" reflection in mirror at night. Underneath the exaggeration, the film dives into it's root causes - fear of seeing oneself or being seen by others.