Children's Literary Salons: Children's Literary Salon: Between Memory & Museum - A Film Screening

Join Arun Wolf, Tara Books, India for an illustrated talk and film screening of Between Memory & Museum: A Dialogue with Folk and Tribal Artists from India. 

The book Between Memory and Museum is based on an extended conversation conducted with 38 extraordinary folk and tribal artists across India.  Museums are influential sites of knowledge about indigenous art forms, and they have a long history of regarding the communities that practise them as anthropological subjects. But many of the artists from these communities are our contemporaries, and they belong to cultures that are very much alive in the present. So how do they feel about their representations? Do these communicate a sense of lived life? What are the artists’ own ways of remembering and passing on tradition? Who has the power to put whom in a museum?

The short film that accompanies the book is set in the Manav Sangrahalaya, an anthropological museum in Bhopal, India, where the conversation developed in the book was initiated. It provides a context for this dialogue between words and images, and features interviews and performances by some of the artists. The film reflects the trajectory of the book by introducing viewers to the origins of these art forms, tracing how they have changed, and exploring the relationship between what has made it into a museum and what remains outside.

Tara Books is an independent publisher of illustrated books for children and adults, based in Chennai, South lndia.