Join us for the closing event of the exhibition ‘Every Land is Karbala’ curated by Epsita Halder on 9th March 2025.

The evening will feature a talk & discussion by Epsita Halder titled “Muharram and mourning in Bangla fiction” followed by Madhuja Mukherjee’s talk featuring screening and discussion titled “Mourning, Performance, and Skin of Film”.

DETAILS:
Date: 9 Mar 2025 | Sunday
Time: 5.00 pm onwards.
Open to All

“Muharram and Mourning in Bangla Fiction”-
Continuing with the flow of this exhibition, this talk will search for the traces of Karbala as a metaphor of pain, distress and dispossession in Bangla prose. It will discuss Abul Bashar’s short stories as the unique field where Karbala is present as a symbolic template simultaneously providing the power of mourning to intensify human expressions. The talk will expose how Karbala, otherwise inconspicuous as a literary trope, radicalises the generic capacities of Bangla prose via Bashar’s writing.

Bio:
Epsita Halder is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, India. She researches and publishes on the Muharram-complex and Shi’a identity formation in Bengal.

“Mourning, Performance, and Skin of Film”-
Drawing from the key ideas of the exhibition, this talk shows how performative aspects of mourning, certain symbols, and overarching themes of martyrdom became pivotal for popular Indian cinema. By considering the performances of the bodily bearing of suffering, the talk illustrates how the act of mourning became a narrative mode.

Bio:
Madhuja Mukherjee is a visual artist, filmmaker and Professor of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

You are warmly invited to join us as we close ‘Every Land is Karbala’ which brought together the vision of a curator and a group of young artists from diverse disciplines to explore the battle of Karbala as a metaphor for injustice, resilience, and transformation.