KNMA presents the latest edition of Material Practices, featuring a screening of Batt Koch (The Lost Lane) followed by a conversation between veteran theatre practitioner and actor M.K. Raina and Dwishojoyee Banerjee.

Through the lens of cinema, the programme explores how places are shaped and remembered through everyday material culture, from food, tea, clothing, and letters to neighbourhoods, architecture, gestures, and storytelling. Moving beyond postcard representations of Kashmir, Batt Koch invites audiences to experience the landscape as a lived world shaped by people, relationships, and memory.

The conversation reflects on how everyday objects, spaces, and practices preserve histories of belonging and displacement. What happens when a house remains but its inhabitants change? How does the memory of a familiar meal, a neighbourhood lane, a gesture, or an old nickname become an archive of home? Together, the screening and discussion explore how material culture carries personal and collective histories across time.

Part of KNMA’s ongoing Material Practices series, the programme invites audiences to reflect on the relationship between material culture and memory, and to consider whether home ultimately resides in geography, objects, or the stories we continue to carry.

About the Speakers
M.K. Raina is an acclaimed theatre director, actor, filmmaker, and cultural practitioner whose work spans theatre, cinema, and arts education. His practice draws deeply from questions of memory, identity, and cultural heritage.

Dwishojoyee Banerjee is a curator and writer whose research explores contemporary art, material culture, archives, and interdisciplinary practices, with a particular interest in memory and the politics of representation.

While you’re here, explore KNMA’s ongoing exhibition
TYEB MEHTA Bearing Weight (with the lightness of being).