From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Asha Mohan (director)
This article is about the filmmaker and director. For works she has directed, see Category:Films directed by Asha Mohan.
**Asha Mohan** is a Kochi-based filmmaker, theatre director, and installation artist known for her immersive, participatory adaptations of narrative works across film and live media. Her practice centers on **medical labour and care ethics** as aesthetic and political problems, drawing heavily on the maritime and colonial histories of Kerala, Ayurvedic medicine, and contemporary biomedical practice.
Mohan first engaged with A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight through a 2018 residency examining surgical metaphor in world literature; her resulting work, *Untranslatable Surgery: A Film Essay*, treats the novel's core conceit (the glitch as untranslatable across media) as generative rather than limiting. The film is structured as a series of *durational readings*—actors sit in hospitals, preschools, and makeshift clinics across South India, reading passages aloud while a fixed camera records their stillness, their breath, and the ambient sound.
Her 2023–2024 project, the nomadic immersive venue The Makeshift Clinic (immersive venue), positioned audience-participants as both witnesses and imagined patients within a mobile installation—a repurposed medical van and a network of underground tunnels (actual UNESCO-recognized heritage drains in Kochi) where acoustic recordings of breathing, heartbeats, and the sound of the earth rubbing against space play at whisper-volume. Visitors navigate by touch; guided by volunteer performers trained in care ethics.
Mohan's work is marked by a refusal to **complete** her interpretations: exhibitions remain open-ended, scripts are rewritten nightly by participating performers, and her films often end mid-sentence. She is a founding member of the Incompletion Collective. [1]
See also
- A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight
- The Makeshift Clinic (immersive venue)
- Untranslatable Surgery: A Film Essay (2021)
- Care ethics and Beach Surgery
- South Asian adaptations of Beach Surgery
References
- ↑ In a 2024 interview with *Artforum*, she stated: "The glitch is not a problem. It is what the story is teaching us: that completion is a violent lie."