‘Project CINEMA CITY’ screening at Rote Fabrik, Zurich

Shreyas Karle, currently on a residency in Switzerland is taking the opportunity to present ‘Project CINEMA CITY, Research Art & Documentary Practices’, at Rote Fabrik. [dated June 2012]

‘Project CINEMA CITY’ screening at Rote Fabrik, Zurich Shreyas Karle, currently on a residency in Switzerland is taking the opportunity to present ‘Project CINEMA CITY, Research Art & Documentary Practices’, to Swiss audiences at Rote Fabrik on Wednesday 20 June. The series of documentaries are part of an archival project that is produced by the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. 

For more information on the screenings click here
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Project brief: 
Project CINEMA CITY Research Art & Documentary Practices

The city and the cinema are twins of the 20th century. In the Asian region especially, the post-colonial cities, huge metropolises and ever-moving populations of this century have contributed to the evolution of a discipline which is as much about an imagination of the city as about a distinct cinematic practice. The histories of these contemporary cities, then, are inextricably linked to their ‘cinemascape’, and vice versa.

Project Cinema City is a set of enquiries into the labour, imagination, desire, access, spaces, locations, iconization, materiality, languages, migrant peoples, viewing conventions, and hidden processes that create the cinema sthe city makes, and also the citiesits cinema produces. The enquiries are then processed into productions of text, film, art, cartography. The multi-disciplinary research work, produced output and all the residuals together form a cinema city archive that is transient and open-ended – to facilitate further readings, more works.

This show, a part of Project Cinema City, focuses on the cinema of the city of Bombay/Mumbai: its production processes and ancillary cultures; its stations of reception and recognition that run through a complex set of networks; the bazaars and streets of the city that hawk the footprints of cinema; and the city-zens’ memory of the contemporary that revolves around cinema. The Project will, in time, include cinema cities across Asia.

Presented by Rajeev Lochan, Director, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi
Curator–Producer Madhusree Dutta
Co-Curator Archana Hande A Majlis initiative in collaboration with KRVIA

Curator's note
The City and Cinema: twins in the large clan of wars, moving peoples and goods, technology-based modernity, and colonial and post-colonial identities of the 20th century. They have never been separated in a crowded fair, and so have never got a chance to rediscover each other at the peak of their youth and at the height of their adrenalin rush. Instead, they have spun a thicker plot in which to impersonate each other, hawk moulds of one another and, most importantly, lay down a set of signs to codify the other.

The relationship between the city and its cinema is imaginary yet tactile, complementary and also ambivalent, momentary and still recyclable – in short, it speaks of a form and its apparition as well. Their relative size and perspective, however, remain fluid and interchangeable, often making the apparition seem much larger than the form itself.

Project Cinema City: Research Art and Documentary Practices is a collaborative endeavour in search of the joints between the form and its apparition, between the city and its cinema. The collaboration is modelled on contemporary, urban systems of post-industrial production: networks of assembling, processing, manufacturing, recycling all independent and yet interdependent. In this show, we display works that are simultaneously products of research, collation, pedagogy, creativity, criticality, and then, an attempt at archiving. In this endeavour of inter-disciplinary collaboration the authors are many, but they are distinct and not faceless. We have attempted a methodology whereby each one’s work exists independently, and yet attains fullness and exuberance only in relation to the works of others. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the series of public shows of Project Cinema City begins in the year that marks 100 years of the cinema in Bombay/Mumbai.

Madhusree Dutta