KVI research seminar: Rahul Sharma “POST-CINEMA IN GALLERY SPACES: FILMS OF AMIT DUTTA”

Rahul Sharma is currently working as a junior-researcher doctoral student in the Department of Art History and Visual Culture at Estonian Academy of Arts. His research is focused on identities in film, migration as well as gallery films. The seminar is a presentation of certain key aspects derived from his upcoming book titled The Phantasmagorical and Ethnographic World of Amit Dutta.

Amit Dutta (b. 1977) is one of the most significant contemporary practitioners of avant-garde Indian cinema. Over the course of his oeuvre, he has created a large body of cinematic works, which number over sixty. With an inherent non-narrative structure, Several of Dutta’s films arguably fall under the category of gallery films and post-cinema. This seminar will begin by looking at the concepts of post-cinema and what has been broadly described as “gallery films” (Fowler, 2004), “new cinematic aesthetic in video” (Iles, 2003) or “cinema of the exhibition” (Royoux, 2000). In particular, it will analyse how Dutta’s cinematic works re-define the contemporary gallery space through his practices. His films such as Chitrashala (2015) and A Game of Shifting Mirrors (2021) look at gallery spaces in different ways. While Chitrashala lingers onto a spectatorless gallery space only to then let loose its depiction of pahari miniatures with animated techniques, Games of Shifting Mirrors (2021) questions the role of the gallery and brings to light the displacement of art over the time-space continuum. The seminar will also briefly discuss his four part 240-minute art-installation cum cinema project Finished/Unfinished (2015). The work circumambulates around the 8th century Shaivite Masrur complex located in Kangra Valley, Himachal Pradesh, much like an old Buddhist monk lost in a religious trance. The work lets the viewers engage in a thorough 360-degree survey of the complex: part-by-part, following each detail as it circumambulates the temple from the forest paths and roads up until the sacred womb.
Dutta’s film Nainsukh (2010), which was named as the Top 30 best-biopics ever made by the New Yorker, will also be a key focal point of the discussion, in how it enlivened recreations of miniature pahari paintings, endemic to the region of Himachal Pradesh in India. Dutta’s employment of the tableaux-vivant style as well as painterly approaches to cinematic techniques will be discussed.
The seminar will look at certain aspects of the aforementioned works in close detail.
Several of Dutta’s films are available online through paid-Vimeo services, while Nainsukh can be viewed for free on Museum Rietberg’s website.