Madhusree Dutta

Madhusree Dutta (born 1959) is an Indian filmmaker, curator, author, and cultural activist.

Life and education

Madhusree Dutta was born in the industrial town of Jamshedpur, Jharkhand (then Bihar). She has studied Economics at Jadavpur University, Kolkata and Dramatics at National School of Drama, New Delhi. In 1987 Dutta shifted her base to Mumbai ( called Bombay in 1987).

Work

Madhusree Dutta brought art practices, activism and pedagogy together in one platform as early as in 1990 when she curated the first national level feminist cultural festival EXPRESSION. The festival witnessed coming together of feminist scholars, women artists and women's movement activists, and is regarded as a landmark in the history of feminism in India. Her works generally contemplates on gender construction, urban development, public arts and documentary practices. Most of her works are situated within a hybrid form engaging multiple genres and a provocative mixing of high art and low art. Her works often display a flamboyant mix of pedagogical, political and experimental indicating towards her multiple identities as political activist and avant garde artist. In order to achieve this mix she has developed a conceptual approach and a practical method of working in collaboration with contemporaries across disciplines and practices. Some of the artists whom she has collaborated with are filmmaker Philip Scheffner (Berlin), photo artist Ines Schaber (Berlin), theatre director Anuradha Kapur (Delhi), visual artist Nilima Sheikh (Baroda) and Archana Hande (Mumbai), architect Rohan Shivkumar (Mumbai), playwright Malini Bhattachaya (Kolkata).

Theatre

Dutta began her career with a Bengali theatre group Anarjya (non-Aryans) in Kolkata, then Calcutta (1983–87). She was also a member of cadre of Sachetana, a feminist group in Kolkata. For Anarjya and Sachetana she directed plays both for proscenium and street theatre. A Bengali adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, and an anti-dowry musical by Malini Bhattacharya – Meye Dile Sajiye (Giving Away the Girl) are considered as two most memorable directorial works of her during that period. In Mumbai too she was active in theatre for a few years before getting fully involved with visual arts. She directed a popular street play for the women's movement – Nari Itihas ki Talash mein (In search of Women's History) in 1988 and an adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata – Aaj Pyar Bandh (Love is on Strike) in 1991. She has even dabbled with television serial in her salad days and directed a 13-epidose Gujarati serial for her friend producer-actor Meenal Patel (1989–1990).

Films

The first film made by her is I Live in Behrampada (1993). The documentary made on a Muslim ghetto in the context of communal riots in Mumbai 1992-93 received Filmfare Award for best documentary in 1994. The film turned out to be a serious discursive material for conflict study and the script of it was published in an anthology - Politics of Violence: From Ayodhya to Behrampada, eds. John McGuire, Peter Reeves and Howard Brasted, Sage Publication, 1996 . Subsequently, she has made several films – documentary, shorts, video spots and non-fiction features . Most of her films are made with the same unit comprising cameraman Avijit Mukul Kishore and editor Shyamal Karmakar. Her 2006 film Seven Islands and A Metro on the city of Bombay / Mumbai was one of the first documentary films to have been commercially released in the theatres in India. Apart from making her own films she has also produced several short films for younger filmmakers. Her role as pedagogue, mentor and producer hae helped consolidating a peer group around documentary practices in Mumbai. Her films had received three National Film Awards.

On 5 October 2015 she participated in a nationwide movement spearheaded by the writers and filmmakers of India to protest against the cultural policy of the state and returned the National Awards as part of the protest.

Curatorial practices

Madhusree Dutta is co-founder of Majlis (1990), an institution that works on cultural activism and women's rights in Mumbai. She functioned as executive director of the institution till March 2016 . She is also a founding member of Akademie Der Künste Der Welt (Academy of Arts of the World) in Cologne and member of the academic council of School of Environment & Architecture, Mumbai. She has been an active member of the women's movement in India and the World Social Forum (WSF) process, and has made major contribution by producing, mobilizing and disseminating arts and artists for the movements.

Project Cinema City: Research Art and Documentary Practices, a monumental endeavor of multi-disciplinary interfaces of arts, is curated by her in 2009-2013. The project enquires into various layers of relationship between the city of Mumbai and the cinema that it manufactures. The project primarily argues for cinema to be regarded as a labour-intensive phenomenon that is connected to labour migration, post-industrial norm of sweatshop production, shifts in urban demography and urban development, access to technology and market etc. Arjun Appadurai, social-cultural anthropologist, wrote in the Foreword of the book Project Cinema City, Tulika Books, 2013 - '"The work of the Cinema City group may be seen as a Situationist move, no longer in the context of Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, but of Bombay in the 1990s and in the decade of the twenty-first century. Like the Situationists, the Cinema City group is not concerned with art as comment on the city but as a product of the city, a lens into urban life and re-situating its already existing visual elements."'The project outputs contain documentary films production, public art installations, pedagogical courses, publications and archiving. The project was first exhibited at Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival) -Forum Expanded as part of the 60th anniversary of the festival in 2010. Subsequently, it was exhibited in the galleries of NGMA (National Gallery of Modern Art) in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore as well as in several smaller galleries and public places in 2011-14. Within the project Madhusree has authored dates.sites: Bombay / Mumbai (co-designed with Shilpa Gupta), Tulika Books, 2012 and co-edited Project Cinema City: Bombay / Mumbai (with Kaushik Bhaumik and Rohan Shivkumar, designed by Sherna Dastur), Tulika Books, 2014. Project Cinema City, an anthology of essays, graphics, annotated films and art works was adjudged the Best Printed Book of the year in Publishing Next Industry Award, 2014 .

Dutta co-edited The Nation, the State and Indian Reality (with Flavia Agnes and Neera Adarkar), Samya of Bhatkal and Sen, 1996. It is an anthology of essays in the context of the demolition of Babri masjid in December 1992. Her international collaboration in book making is a project (with Ines Schaber) titled KEYWORDING: Notes on Enculturation of Words and Word Practice within the Image Archive – for the 50th anniversary of Arsenal Institute of films and Video Art – Berlin.

In her pursuit for newer and subversive forms Dutta has also produced a popular CDrom game Spice Adventures, in collaboration with artist Shilpa Gupta. The interactive narrative, with games and animation, unveils the secret of Indian cuisine – spices that have migrated to India from all over the world. The same pursuit also led to several digital archiving projects and pedagogical initiatives in found footage filmmaking. One such project Godaam is available online in the free access site PADMA (Public Access Digital Media Archive).

Dutta was jury in Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival) Shorts in 2015; Feminale: International Women's Film Festival, Cologne in 2006; Message to Man International Documentary Film Festival, St. Petersburg in 2001; and was chair person of the jury in Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala International Film Festival in 2009; and SIGNS festival of digital videos in 2014. Her retrospective was held in NGBK Gallery; Berlin in 2001, in Feminale, Cologne in 2006; in Madurai Film Festival in 2007; Persistance Resistance Film Festival, Delhi in 2008 and in Signs festival for digital videos, Kochi in 2014.

References

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