Soumik Datta Arts: The Open Fund For Organisations
Soumik Datta Arts present “Mone Rekho”
Aga Khan Music Award winner Soumik Datta is a British Indian musician who consistently pushes the boundaries of Indian music. From collaborations with artists like Beyonce, to incorporating animations and film, to using music to raise awareness of issues that impact the Global South, his aim is to expand what music is capable of through multi-artform collaborations, digital education and engagement with charity and technology partners.
To support his catalogue of work, Soumik Datta Arts (SDA) is a charity that bridges Indian classical music with contemporary artforms to create productions responding to themes including climate justice, racism and migration.
‘Mone Rekho’ (or ‘remember’ in Bengali) is a music production that encompasses new compositions inspired by memory and South Asian aural traditions.
Using archival recordings of Soumik’s guru, the work will create a dialogue between the late sarod maestro Pandit Buddhadev Das Gupta and Soumik as his student. The music will feature new interpretations of Indian classical music that flickers, fragments and fades reflecting the erasure of Indian history and questioning the safeguarding of aural traditions from the Global South.
The project was born through conversations with elderly South Asian patients living with dementia, whom Soumik met at Sonali Gardens Care Centre (Shadwell) through workshops facilitated by Alzehimer’s Society senior research fellow Dr Naaheed Mukadam, consultant psychiatrist at UCLH.
The production will see Soumik move between the roles of sarod player, interviewer, student and storyteller in an immersive space that shifts from concert hall to classroom, to studio, to care home.