The Future of Women will be the History of Women

Paula Sengupta is an artist-pedagogue, art writer and curator who graduated in painting from the College of Art, New Delhi, followed by an MFA and PhD in Printmaking from Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan. She is currently Professor and Head of the Department of Graphics-Printmaking, and former Dean at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. She is Member of the Board of Governors at the Indian Institute of Management, Shillong; and Secretary of the artists’ initiative, Khoj Kolkata.

Trained as a printmaker, Paula’s repertoire as an artist includes broadsheets, artist’s books, objects, installation, animation, and community art projects. She works across mediums that include printmaking, textiles and embroidery, papermaking, drawing, moving image, and much else. Paula’s work addresses gender binaries, enforced migration, loss of home, heritage and environment, and a concern for conservation of societies, communities and ecologies. Her language is distinctly feminine, therefore laying claim to methods and materials that underline feminist thought.

Madhuja Mukherjee extends her research into art-practice, curatorial-work and filmmaking. Her media-installations complicate archival histories and media material; her solo shows were held at Nandan Art Gallery, Visva-Bharati University, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Victoria Memorial and more. She co-wrote the internationally acclaimed film 'Qissa'; her experimental feature-film, 'Carnival', premiered at the 41st International Film Festival Rotterdam, and her narrative-feature, ‘Deep6’, premiered at the 26th Busan International Film Festival. Her academic book publications include: ‘New Theatres Ltd.’  ‘Aural Films, Oral Cultures’ the award-winning volume ‘Voices of the Talking Stars’. Madhuja is the artistic director of TENT Biennale Kolkata, a festival for experimental films and new media art; she is Professor of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and Vice-Chair of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society. 

Sanchayan Ghosh lives and works in Santiniketan and Kolkata, West Bengal India. He is currently an Associate Professor, Department of Painting, Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan. He completed his Master of Fine Arts from the Department of Painting, Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan in 1997. Sanchayan Ghosh has been practicing site-specific art as a workshop based collective community dialogue, leading to numerous forms of public engagements over the last twenty years. His interest in process-based collaborative making and sharing of art lead him to interact also with different performance forms from all over India. Moreover, through his regular engagement in pedagogy he has explored art practice as a critical engagement of individual and collective conversation where he has collaborated and participated in different interdisciplinary encounters exploring institutional space as an interface of the private and the public. He has also worked in different kinds of self-organized initiatives in different parts of the world and explored the transforming relationship of land, location, labour and practice. He has been awarded a Charles Wallace Fellowship, United Kingdom, in 2003-04 and worked on Merge Down and Resist with 3 generations of Asian migrants on framing of identities in Bristol. He has also participated in Kochi-Muziris Biennale and explored a community sound project Incomplete Circles, Invisible Voices in 2012. He has participated in Dhaka Biennale in 2016 with a collective performative project Reading from the Gendered Land with women students of Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati and Charukala Anushad, University of Dhaka. He has participated in the education project Under the Mango Tree in documenta 14 and has conducted a ‘Circle Walk’ in 2017. He has also been associated with different pedagogy projects in Kala Bhavana, National School of Drama, Goethe-Institut and more. He co-curated the second session of Under the Mango Tree in Santiniketan and at Kochi-Muziris Students’ Biennale. Ghosh’s collaborative sound project Short Wave’s Transit Tales was commissioned by documenta 14, which has been showcased in Basel, Switzerland, Berlin and Weimar, Germany. His noteworthy solo exhibitions include Reversed Perspective: 3 Conjunctures (2014) and Sisyphus Effect, presented 2010 in Kolkata together with Experimenter.

Astrid Wege is the director of the Goethe-Institut Kolkata. After studying cultural sciences at the University of Hildesheim, she worked for many years as a curator and publicist in the field of contemporary art; until 2014, she headed the European Kunsthalle in Cologne. In 2014 she began her work at the Goethe-Institut Moscow as head of the cultural programs with a regional assignment for Eastern Europe and Central Asia. From November 2020 she has been the director of the Goethe-Institute in Kolkata, India.