The 10-day festival, from November 13 to 22, will bring exhibitions, performances, screenings, talks and public installations to unconventional spaces across the city, revisiting cultural expressions of resistance from the 1940s to the 1990s.
On view from November 13 to 22, the exhibition will explore five artistic approaches — Poetics, Satire, Protest, Contraventions and Metaphor — tracing how artists responded to political upheaval, economic uncertainty and social change. It will also examine the emergence of an art practice rooted in collective expression, resistance and hope.
Scheduled from November 13 to 22, the festival will explore how artists, writers, performers and cultural movements have engaged with the city’s social and political realities, while asserting the ordinary person’s right to public spaces. Spanning 10 public programmes, the festival will take art and conversations to a diverse range of venues, including the Alipore Museum, a colonial-era prison-turned-museum, a football club, a newspaper archive, university campuses, heritage residences and public plazas. Theatre will take centre stage at Sovabazar Nat Mandir on November 15 and 16 with The House that Remembers , a site-specific participatory performance specially developed for the festival by The Urban Theatre Project. The installation will also serve as a space for a series of events from November 20 to 22. These include poetry readings at a cabin hotel on College Street, an unplugged tribute to the musical experiments of Moheener Ghoraguli, a conversation with a captain of the 1981 Women’s World Cup team, and a live lettering performance on a city wall accompanied by songs of resistance.
Moving beyond conventional museum spaces, DAG’s annual festival, ‘The City as a Museum’, is set to return to Kolkata for its sixth edition. Through exhibitions, pop-up installations, theatre, music, film screenings and discussions, this edition will revisit the period between the 1940s and 1990s, examining how artistic practices reflected everyday struggles and became expressions of solidarity and dissent. The festival will open with Open City , an exhibition of paintings, drawings and archival material from the 1940s to the 1990s, at the Alipore Museum. Revisiting a significant episode from colonial Bengal, the production explores the controversy surrounding the translation of Dinabandhu Mitra’s play Nil Darpan and the subsequent state crackdown, examining how the incident brought together voices of solidarity across nationalities and languages. At the Plaza of Dakshinapan Shopping Complex, artist and pedagogue Sanchayan Ghosh will present We the People , a public installation inspired by artist Nandalal Bose’s engagement with the Haripura Congress. The work looks at public art as a means of collectively imagining the nation and its people. The programme will extend into more unconventional cultural experiences. Through this edition, DAG shifts the focus from Kolkata’s celebrated landmarks to the people, movements and cultural expressions that have shaped its identity. Drawing on the idea of the ‘right to the city’, the festival examines how public spaces have been claimed, contested and reimagined through everyday life and artistic expression. You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test Get the latest Lifestyle News and more. Download the TOI app.