Dates.sites: Project Cinema City, Bombay/Mumbai – Ed. Madhushree Dutta

Description

Dates.sites presents a timeline of the city of Bombay/Mumbai in the 20th century, anchored to its most adored public institution: cinema.

Why this timeline when it is now generally accepted that dates are rigid and memories porous – and that the latter needs to be prioritized over the former? How does one create a timeline that is neither cast in stone nor vulnerable to the charge of ‘manufacturing a past’? How does one evolve a timeline for a geographically defined entity in the context of its popular cultures that are defined by specific processes of production and distribution? These were some of the challenges that confronted the making of this volume.’

Concept and text by Madhusree Dutta. Design and graphics by Shilpa Gupta and Madhusree Dutta. With the artists’ biographies. This publication is a project of Majlis, a centre for rights discourse and multi-disciplinary arts initiative based in Mumbai.