It has been a year and a week since the lockdown in India. Passé as it might be to say, nonetheless, what a surreally tragic year it has been for everyone. It has made us value so much in life that we took for granted. It has made us introspect and realise even more so the relevance of an art institution like ours.

आनन्दाद्धयेव खल्विमानि भूतानि जायन्ते

आनन्देन जातानि जीवन्ति

आनन्दं प्रयन्त्यभिसंविशन्ति।

(in Sanskrit)

From pure joy

Springs all creation

By joy it is sustained

Towards joy it proceeds

And to joy it returns.

(translated into English)

Rig Veda 1500-1000 BC

Monthly Meet the Artist Programme went Online

Meet the Artist (MTA) is a permanent programme of the JDCA, where invited artists, craft persons or scholars through their illustrated presentations create an appreciation of all forms of visual art. It has run uninterruptedly for almost 19 years, since September 2001 till February 2020 from the Centre's camp office in Bhubaneswar.

The pandemic lockdown temporarily halted this programme till we resurrected the MTA in its new online form in September 2020. It has helped us connect beyond geographical locations, allowing us to invite many eminent cultural professionals to a varied audience interested in the arts across the country and the world.

To view the video recordings please click on the thumbnail images below.

244 Meet The Artist programme

with Deputy Director & Senior Curator 

of South and Southeast Asian Art, Museum Rietberg, Zurich

Dr Johannes Beltz, on:

Collaboration Matters: Indian Art & Artists at the Museum Rietberg

6pm, Saturday, 10 April 2021

Live on Zoom & YouTube

The talk presents the Museum Rietberg In Zurich as one of the most important cultural institutions in the field of Indian art in Switzerland. It explores the museum's history, collections and activities focusing on the significance of international collaboration. It suggests that museums need to cooperate more than ever if they want to remain (or to become) relevant. Through a series of examples, successful models of cooperation will be discussed. The talk illustrates how art museums are places to discover pasts and to negotiate the future.  

Dr Johannes Beltz is Deputy Director & Senior Curator of Indian and South-East Asian Art at the Museum Rietberg, in Zurich. Having studied Indology and Indian religions at the Universities of Halle, Strasbourg, Lausanne, Paris and Heidelberg, his main interests lie in the fields of Buddhism and Hinduism, art and culture, in the past as well as in contemporary societies. He curated numerous exhibitions, such as "Next Stop Niravana: Approaches to Buddhism" in 2018 or "Javanese Shadow Theatre: Stories about Life and the World" (2020).

JDCA's Ongoing Construction 

 Gradually 20,000 sft of the JD Centre of Art has been built. It has been a difficult journey to bring to fruition. We are creating an Art Centre that will blur the lines between arts and crafts, between artists and craftspeople, between creators and audiences and between adults and children. 

Online archival footage by Biren Das on Odisha’s cultural heritage

JDCA had partnered with the National Cultural Audiovisual Archives (NCAA), a part of Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) to digitise archival footage shot by the eminent documentary film-maker and JDCA’s Founder Trustee, Biren Das. Das had donated this collection of footage from his tele-series Ajira Odisha (Odisha Today) shot in 1990s. Through this year-long project, Umatic and Beta cassettes were catalogued, salvaged and digitised. This audio-visual archive of 450 hours of archival footage from 1294 cassettes is significant by its documentation of vanishing traditional arts and crafts of Odisha. This archival footage is now available for public viewing on the NCAA's online portal. 

To view the collection, click here.

We are thankful for all of you who have supported us in way or another. Your contribution will help us realise this aspirational Centre.

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