Madhusree Dutta

Madhusree’s curatorial projects combine radical art practices with pedagogy, political campaigns, and public cultures. Her works of Public Art curation include Expression, the first women's arts festival in India in 1990, and culture@WSF, a large-scale public art project within the World Social Forum in Mumbai in 2004, Porto Alegre in 2005 and Nairobi in 2007. For Akademie Der Künste Der Welt she curated Memory Stations in 2019 – a public history project engaging nine towns in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. In 2020, Ghosts, Traces, Echoes: Works in Shifts was co-curated with Eva Busch – an exhibition project on cultures around work in Ruhrgebiet, the former industrial zone of Germany. Project Cinema City: Research Art and Documentary Practices, • Illustration — Project Cinema City Project Cinema City: Research Art and Documentary Practices, a research project with multi-disciplinary interfaces of arts, is curated by her in 2009-2013. The project enquires into various layers of the 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. The project outputs contain documentary films production, public art installations, pedagogical courses, publications, and archives. 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 National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore as well as in several smaller galleries and public places in 2011-14

• How to Make Female Action Heroes, Kayfa ta, 2023, • Fake hybrid sites palimpsest: Essays on Leakages, co-edited with Nanna Heidenreich, De Gruyter, 2021 • Project Cinema City, co-edited with Kaushik Bhaumik and Rohan Shivkumar, Tulika Books, 2013 / Columbia University Press • Arjun Appadurai, social-cultural anthropologist, wrote in the foreword of the book: "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 a comment on the city but as a product of the city, a lens into urban life and re-situating its already existing visual elements." Project Cinema City, an anthology of essays, graphics, annotated films and artworks, was adjudged the Best Printed Book of the Year in Publishing Next Industry Award, 2014. • dates.sites: Bombay / Mumbai (co-designed with Shilpa Gupta), Tulika Books, Columbia University Press, 2012, a graphic timeline of the public cultures in the 20th century. • The Nation, the State and Indian Identity, co-edited with Flavia Agnes and Neera Adarkar, Samya of Bhatkal and Sen, in 1996. It is an anthology of essays in the context of the demolition of Babri Masjid in December 1992. • KEYWORDING: Notes on Enculturation of Words and Word Practice within the Image Archive, with Berlin-based artist Ines Schaber. It is a book-making endeavour, conceived as part of Living Archive Project to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Arsenal Institute for Film 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 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. Her 2026 film Flying Tigers premiered at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival. The film, named for the aircraft that transferred military supplies during WWII across the Himalayas, combines documentary style with archival materials, musical numbers, and performance to tell the story of the border populations that exist between India and China. Apart from making her own films, she has also produced several documentaries for younger filmmakers. Her role as a pedagogue, mentor, and producer has helped to consolidate a peer group around documentary practices in Mumbai. Her films had received three National Film Awards. She relinquished them in 2015 as part of a nationwide campaign against political interference in academic institutions.

• Filmfare Award for best documentary for I Live in Behrampada, 1994 • 1996, 2001 National Film Award, India • Second Best Film Award, International Video Fest, 1995; • Best Public Service Advertisement Award, 1998; • Best Script award in Shanghai International Film Festival, 2001; • IDPA Awards for best Kannada film and best Bengali film, 2001; • HIVOS Culture Award for Asia region, 2005 • Special Jury Award in Film Southasia, 2007; • John Abrahan Best Documentary award (as producer), 2012; • Kölner Kulturpreis "Cultural Manager of the year 2018", Kölner Kulturpreis, 2019 www.koelnerkulturrat.de • "Lifetime Achievement Award", International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK)Award for filmmaker Madhusree Dutta • Several citizens’ award in India and a peer-nominated art prize for artistic achievements by Atelier Automatique in Bohum, Germany (2022).