In 10 programmes — open to everyone — between November 13 to 22, the DAG (formerly Delhi Art Gallery) will shift the focus from iconic landmarks and hold its sixth edition of The City as a Museum in locations like a football club, a newspaper archive, aristocratic homes, a museum in a colonial-era prison and public plazas. How does an ordinary citizen inhabit public space?
Resistance was never homogeneous in its expression. “This year we focus on an exceptionally prolific period of art in Bengal, from the 1940s to the 1990s, when new experiments in art were driven by responses to socio-political upheaval and by varied forms of cultural resistance. “The artists featured in this year’s festival were part of a rich and diverse cultural milieu, and the histories of their practices demand engagements that are just as varied, cutting across theatre, cinema, poetry and music. Beyond the literary, artists such as Prokash Karmakar and Nikhil Biswas took art beyond the gallery and onto the streets, paralleling Third Theatre experiments that moved performance out of the proscenium and into public spaces,” Anand added. “It’s an extraordinary initiative by DAG to bring a mammoth event like this to the forefront. It was always meant to host iconic stories. That we can present this story on the same ground where two thousand signatures were gathered in protest speaks to who we are and what our voices are capable of.
Rabin Mondal, Reba Hore and others were poets themselves, while Anil Karanjai was a key member of the Hungryalists [a group of poets founded in 1961 who experimented greatly with form].
The programming, said its organisers, will integrate a multidisciplinary approach to curate the socio-cultural histories of resistance that has shaped Kolkata over the decades. It has always been interdisciplinary, said Ashish Anand, MD & CEO, DAG. This allows us to bring forward lesser-known histories of modern Indian art, featuring artists such as Rabin Mondal, Prokash Karmakar and Nikhil Biswas, among others, while placing the festival in dialogue with movements and solidarities of our own times,” said Anand. I hope I can shed some light on a story that people will go home and dive deeper into,” Sammadar said. “Over the last two years we have also travelled to smaller cities and towns such as Santiniketan and Kalimpong, expanding our understanding of the many centres that shaped modern art practice,” Anand said.
Meanwhile, ‘Shob Khelar Shera’ will include a presentation by Bandyopadhyay will situate football within the politics of the Swadeshi movement, while a conversation with Kuntala Ghosh Dastidar carries this history into questions of gender . Over the last six years, DAG has also moved out of Kolkata and travelled to Mumbai and Delhi for two editions of the festival. In highlighting each city’s different and distinct cultural histories, the City as a Museum has opened up to revisiting the ways in which art was created and circulated across the nation.
The House that Remembers, a site-specific participatory theatre performance at Sovabazar Nat Mandir on November 15 and 16, developed by The Urban Theatre Project, will explore how the translation of a play became the cause for state crackdown in the 19th century; We the People, a public installation developed by artist and pedagogue Sanchayan Ghosh at the Plaza, Dakshinapan Shopping Complex, takes inspiration from Nandalal Bose’s series of paintings of everyday life for the pandal of the 51st Congress session in Haripura, Gujarat; Open City, an exhibition of paintings, drawings and archival material from the 1940s to the 1990s, will be on view at the Alipore Museum, once used as a prison. Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta 71, a genre-defying film that captures the city in 1971, will also be screened at the Alipore Museum, while a presentation by sports historian Kausik Bandyopadhyay will explore how football became a site of resistance in postcolonial Bengal at Mohammedan Sporting Club. James Long’s commissioned translation of Dinabandhu Mitra’s Nil Darpan , a play tied to the Indigo Rebellion of 1859. It will be held at Sovabazar Nat Mandir on November 15-16.
Art historian Nandini Ghosh will deliver an illustrated talk on how the city became a ground for dissent and collectivism; Author Ashok Bhaumik will deliver a talk by artist that will revisit the creative practices of artists like Chittaprosad, Somnath Hore, Bijan Chowdhury, and Debabrata Mukhopadhyay in the context of the activism of that era. The festival programming also looks at the way the city in strife also became a space for solidarity. DAG makes a case for it with ‘The House that Remembers’- a participatory performance directed by Ninad Sammadar. It reimagines the solidarity meeting that was held and the criminal libel proceedings of Rev.
