Deep Dive | Adip Dutta

Adip Dutta (b. 1970) is currently a member of the Faculty of Visual Arts at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. Education: 2000 Master of Visual Arts (MVA), Dept. of Sculpture, Faculty of Visual Arts, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata; 1998 Bachelor of Visual Arts (BVA), Dept. of Sculpture, Faculty of Visual Arts, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata; 1994 Bachelor of Arts, Sociology Honours, University of Calcutta, Kolkata. Solo Exhibitions: 2017 By Darkling Ground, Experimenter, Kolkata; 2013 Of Cages, Trappings & Pain, Selma Feriani Gallery, London; 2012 In Pain I Redeem Love, Experimenter, Art Dubai.

Tapati Guha Thakurta is currently Honorary Professor of History and was the Director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) from 2012 to 2017. She helped to set up the Jadunath Bhavan Museum and Resource Centre, a unit of the CSSSC. She has written widely on the art and cultural history of modern India. Her three main books are The Making of a New 'Indian' Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Columbia University Press, and Permanent Black, 2004); and In the Name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata (Delhi: Primus Books, 2015). She is also the author of the exhibition monographs – such as Visual Worlds of Modern Bengal: An introduction to the documentation archive of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (Seagull, Kolkata, 2002), The Aesthetics of the Popular Print: Lithographs and Oleographs from 19th and 20th Century India (Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata, 2006), The City in the Archive: Calcutta’s Visual Histories (Calcutta: CSSSC, 2011). She has also co-edited two anthologies of essays – Theorising the Present: Essays for Partha Chatterjee (Delhi: OUP, 2011) and New Cultural Histories of India: Materiality and Practices (Delhi: OUP, 2013). In 2019, she was assigned the work of preparing a dossier on the Durga Pujas which has been submitted by the Government of India to UNESCO for inscription under its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Naveen Kishore established Seagull Books in 1982 as a publishing programme in the arts and media focusing on drama, film, art and culture studies. Today, it also publishes literature, including poetry and serious fiction and owns the worldwide English-language publishing rights for books by Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Bernhard, Imre Kertész, Yves Bonnefoy, Mo Yan, Mahasweta Devi, Peter Handke, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, among many others. Kishore turned to photography where he extensively documented female impersonators from Manipuri, Bengali and Punjabi theatre practices. In particular he photographed Chapal Bhaduri, a female impersonator of the Bengali folk theatre, Jatra, in a project titled ‘Performing the Goddess’. Some of these pictures were exhibited as a part of the show, ‘Woman/Goddess’. He is also the recipient of the Goethe Medal and the Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.