Sep 11 2026 to Sep 11 2026 6:30 p.m.

Where

Museum of Art & Photography (MAP)

Kasturba Road, Bengaluru 560001

Event Description

What can a lobby card tell us about the ways we have imagined, remembered and encountered Indian cinema?

Marking the launch of the publication ‘The Momentary and the Monumental’, this panel brings together contributors Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Debashree Mukherjee and Iyesha Geeth Abbas to reflect on the histories, aesthetics and material lives of popular cinema publicity. Moving beyond the films themselves, the conversation will consider lobby cards and related ephemera as carefully constructed visual objects—shaped by photographers, artists, designers, printers and the conditions of their circulation.

Drawing on their contributions to the publication, the speakers will explore what these often-overlooked images reveal about the visual language of Indian cinema, the cultures of print and publicity that surrounded it, and the ways in which cinematic memory is produced beyond the screen. The discussion will also open up questions around the archives and histories that remain to be uncovered, and what it means to look closely at the material traces of popular cinema.

Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a film historian, and an occasional art curator. He is the author of Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic (1982); Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (2009); and The Last Cultural Mile: An Inquiry into Technology and Governance in India (2011). He edited the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (with Paul Willemen) (1994/1999); In the Wake of Aadhaar: the Digital Ecosystem of Governance in India (2013); and a book of Kumar Shahani’s writings, The Shock of Desire and Other Essays (2015). He co–wrote, with Nishant Shah and Nafis Aziz Hasan, the book Overload, Creep, Excess: An Internet from India (2021). Rajadhyaksha co–curated (with Geeta Kapur) the ‘Bombay/Mumbai 1992–2001’ section of ‘Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis’ at Tate Modern (2002); the ‘You Don’t Belong’ festival of film and video in four cities in China (2011) and ‘Memories of Cinema’ at the 4th Guangzhou Triennial (2011); ‘“Make–Belong”: Films in Kochi from China and Hong Kong’, Kochi–Muziris Biennale (2015); and the exhibition ‘Tah–Satah: A Very Deep Surface: Mani Kaul & Ranbir Singh Kaleka: Between Film and Video’ at the Jawahar Kala Kendra Jaipur; and Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid From Bollywood to the Emergency (January–March 2017).

Debashree Mukherjee
Debashree Mukherjee is Associate Professor of film and media studies in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University, and co–director of the Center for Comparative Media. Author of Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press, 2020), Debashree has several peer–reviewed publications and edits the journal, Screen. Her current research project, Tropical Machines, develops a media history of South Asian indentured migration and plantation modernity from the 1830s onwards. Debashree has received an ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) fellowship to complete this book in 2026. Her latest book is the co–edited anthology The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (2024) which won the first Aruna Vasudev book award from the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC).

Iyesha Geeth Abbas
Iyesha Geeth Abbas has been engaged in research and access work at audio–visual archives since 2009. Previously, she worked with the Mumbai–based studio CAMP, and as an independent researcher, has also been part of an extensive silent cinema research project with historian Virchand Dharamsey. She currently works at the National Film Archive of India, where she handles film programming, archival research and cataloguing activities. She is also currently engaged in an IFA fellowship project at the archives of the National Centre for Biological Sciences.