The city of Mumbai is once again turning into an open-air museum this March, as DAG Museums presents the second edition of The City as a Museum, Mumbai. The ongoing festival reimagines Mumbai as a living archive—where its streets, institutions, and histories become both venue and collaborator in a dynamic exploration of performance, art, community, and memory.
Spanning two weeks, the festival dives into the city’s layered relationship with artistic and social movements through performances, film screenings, heritage walks, workshops, and talks. This year’s edition foregrounds the intersections between art and public space, tracing how creative practices have shaped, resisted, and redefined Mumbai’s cultural life over decades.
The City as a Museum: Programmes
The festival opened with Sawal Jawab, a performance directed by Girish Datar and featuring Sukanya Gurav, that revisits the intertwined legacies of Tamasha, Lavani, and Shahiri—forms that historicized dissent and working-class expression in Maharashtra’s cultural fabric. A post-performance conversation with Tamasha historian Sandesh Bhandare further anchored this inquiry into how folk performance continues to bridge entertainment and critique.
Later, Saacha (The Loom) by Anjali Monteiro and K. P. Jayasankar drew audiences into the confluence of art, poetry, and labour rights. Featuring painter Sudhir Patwardhan and poet Narayan Surve, the film reflects on post-industrial Mumbai and the textile workers’ movement, with discussions focusing on the evolution of collective media practice and the ethics of archiving.
Among the upcoming highlights is Caste in Caricature at Siddhartha College Library—once built around B. R. Ambedkar’s own collection, where author Unnamati Syama Sundar and Professor Vijay Mohite will examine colonial-era depictions of Ambedkar, culminating in a stand-up performance by Ankur Tangade that blends satire with social commentary.
Next week, poetry takes centre stage in the Kala Ghoda precinct with Bombay Poetry Crawl’s walking tour celebrating the Clearing House collective—featuring legacies of Arun Kolatkar, Gieve Patel, Adil Jussawalla, and others—followed by a talk by poet Jerry Pinto at the David Sassoon Library.
Nature and faith also find a place in this unfolding city-as-exhibition: at the Bombay Natural History Society, journalist Vrushal Pendharkar explores the illustrated archives of Carl D’Silva, while Faith in Form at Our Lady of Salvation Church in Dadar brings together architect Nondita Correa Mehrotra and poet-curator Ranjit Hoskote to reflect on Charles Correa’s sacred modernism and artworks by M. F. Husain and Anjolie Ela Menon.
The festival’s closing stretch includes a guided tour of the Kanheri Caves led by archaeologist Suraj A. Pandit, revealing Mumbai’s ancient Buddhist history, and The Citizen-Artist at Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute, where artist Navjot and curator Nancy Adajania revisit the socially engaged art practices of Altaf and Navjot in the 1970s and ’80s.
As the festival continues through March 16, The City as a Museum reaffirms DAG’s commitment to showing how art, activism, and everyday life intersect in Mumbai, inviting residents to not just view the city’s heritage, but to inhabit it with renewed awareness.
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
