The ‘Great Unknown': the movie theatre in our time

In late 1992 and early 1993, Bombay saw among the worst riots in its modern history. Framed by these riots, the exhibition Bombay/Mumbai 1992–2001 at the Tate Modern had placed a tent theatre that offered a specific argument for when Bombay became Mumbai. The movie theatre had been the only major public institution to be eliminated in the years that followed. Both the birth and demise of the movie theatre thus bookends a history of the public domain: 1896, when cinema was born, came after plague epidemic and the Bombay Improvement Trust, and 1992, when the theatre died, came with new technologies for privatising, regulating and pirating the moving image.