The IFA Archive Open House #2 | A Conversation with A Mangai (V Padma) | Thursday, June 16, 2022

India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) and the Indorama Charitable Trust
invite you to
The IFA Archive Open House #2
with A Mangai (V Padma)
in conversation with Biswadeep Chakraborty (Archivist, IFA)

Thursday, June 16, 2022 | 06:30 PM - 07:30 PM IST | Zoom and Facebook Live

Please note: Due to personal reasons, Makarand Sathe will not be able to join this session as one of the speakers.

What is the archive and how do we approach it, fully cognizant of its inbuilt structures of power and privileges? What happens when one has only oral stories, collective memories and witnessing to construct histories from? How do these archival materials lend themselves to newer meaning when a theatre practitioner engages with them in a different socio-political context?

Join us for an evening of conversations between IFA grantee A Mangai (V Padma) and Biswadeep Chakraborty, Archivist at IFA. Mangai embarked on a project to write critical histories of Tamil theatre. She will discuss the journey of her project; her engagement with different kinds of archival material; the material generated during the project; and possibilities of new work coming out of it.

A Mangai (V Padma) is a scholar and theatre practitioner who has actively engaged in Tamil theatre as an actor, director, and playwright for almost three decades. She received a grant from IFA under the Arts Research programme in 2017-18 to write a critical history of early twentieth-century Tamil theatre using the writings of Pammal Sammadha Mudaliar. You can find information about the project at the online archive:

• https://theifaarchive.org/user/single_grant/420

Click here to register for the discussion on Zoom.

The discussion will also be streamed live on our Facebook page, for which no prior registration is required.

Launched in 2018, The IFA Archive is a space that holds the diverse materials of the projects supported and implemented by IFA over the years, currently featuring materials from 372 projects online at https://www.theifaarchive.org/

The IFA Archive Open House is a series of conversations with artists and scholars around the materials deposited at the IFA Archive at the end of their projects.

The IFA Archive is built with support from the Indorama Charitable Trust.