Museums: India - Revision history

Shivam: /* Museum of Partition */

2018-01-04T14:18:51Z

‎Museum of Partition

Shivam: /* Museum of collectibles from home and the universe */

2018-01-04T13:52:14Z

‎Museum of collectibles from home and the universe

Shivam: /* Egyptian mummies */

2018-01-04T13:35:34Z

‎Egyptian mummies

Shivam: /* (Sexualised) Museum of Unbelonging */

2018-01-04T03:31:50Z

‎(Sexualised) Museum of Unbelonging

Shivam: /* Egyptian mummies */

2018-01-04T03:30:55Z

‎Egyptian mummies

Shivam: /* Museum of collectibles from home and the universe */

2018-01-04T03:28:31Z

‎Museum of collectibles from home and the universe

Shivam: /* (Sexualised)Museum of Unbelonging */

2018-01-04T03:27:27Z

‎(Sexualised)Museum of Unbelonging

Shivam: /* (Sexualised)Museum of Unbelonging */

2018-01-04T03:15:33Z

‎(Sexualised)Museum of Unbelonging

Shivam: /* Egyptian mummies */

2018-01-04T03:15:13Z

‎Egyptian mummies

Shivam: /* Dolls Museum */

2018-01-04T03:12:42Z

‎Dolls Museum

← Older revision		Revision as of 14:18, 4 January 2018
Line 116:		Line 116:

	The Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust (TAACHT), which is housed in the 150-year-old Town Hall in Amritsar, is a repository of art, artefact, documents and oral histories. Opened in October 2016, it is spread across three rooms and will eventually have seven galleries across 16,000 square feet. There will also be a gallery of hope. "That's why this museum is there. To heal," says Desai.		The Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust (TAACHT), which is housed in the 150-year-old Town Hall in Amritsar, is a repository of art, artefact, documents and oral histories. Opened in October 2016, it is spread across three rooms and will eventually have seven galleries across 16,000 square feet. There will also be a gallery of hope. "That's why this museum is there. To heal," says Desai.
		+
		+	= Museum Bhavan =
		+	[http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/museum-mithu-sen-subodh-gupta-tm-krishna-kishwar-desai-dayanita-singh/1/939461.html Chinki Sinha , The mother of museums “India Today” 8/5/2017]
		+
		+	Spaces within spaces. museums within museums. Compact and foldable, they are entire worlds in themselves. Together, they are a vast realm of memories going back to 1981, when she started photographing.
		+
		+	And so there is a Museum of Little Ladies and a FileMuseum, a Museum of Men and the Museum of Photography, Museums of Factories, Furniture and Vitrines, as well as a Museum of Chance.
		+
		+	Dayanita Singh's Museum Bhavan is a mother museum, holding within it nine smaller museums. Her museums give birth to other museums. But she is quick to add that they aren't mating.
		+
		+	Her journey began by asking herself the question: could the museum itself be not just a venue, but a form in itself? "I am making museums as a form and architecture," she says. "My work is so much about the dissemination and opening and closing of structures, adding and removing objects."
		+
		+	Arranged in clusters, her museums act as screens. Folded, they are immersive spaces where you can pull out a stool and lose yourself in time. Open another, and you might find a table and two stools, with no backrest. So that you can lean in, and listen to the other.
		+
		+	For her most recent Museum Bhavan, Dayanita has as her raw material 800 photographs. Each structure has 140 photographs inside it, but only 40 can be displayed at any given point.
		+
		+	Her mother's bedside drawer was always full of things. It was my personal museum of clips, says Dayanita. "My house was full of albums. To me, you printed a photograph to make something. The book was an obvious format. My mother would tell me that someday these photographs will be of tremendous importance. A photograph is when a lot is left unsaid." But then if you are a poet or a dancer, it opens up incredible and infinite possibilities.
		+
		+	She is interested in events unfolding outside the frame and in pictures interacting with each other to form part or whole of a narrative. She doesn't believe in captioning her images. Facts limit the scope of a picture. Place it in another context, and you can have a million other narratives, a million other chances.
		+
		+	Next on her agenda is a pocket museum. She already has a suitcase museum.

← Older revision		Revision as of 13:52, 4 January 2018
Line 107:		Line 107:

	"It is part of us. A memory. An ongoing thing of archiving which is so fleeting," he says. Memory has poetic licence. It goes back and forth, it edits and reconfigures. His museum then is a nostalgist's landscape.		"It is part of us. A memory. An ongoing thing of archiving which is so fleeting," he says. Memory has poetic licence. It goes back and forth, it edits and reconfigures. His museum then is a nostalgist's landscape.
		+
		+	= Museum of Partition =
		+	[http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/museum-mithu-sen-subodh-gupta-tm-krishna-kishwar-desai-dayanita-singh/1/939461.html Chinki Sinha , A space for healing “India Today” 8/5/2017]
		+
		+	When she began asking people to share their stories of Partition and give her one object that they had brought with them, Kishwar Desai, a writer and an artist, was trying to archive the biggest migration in history for which there are written records and photographs but no artefact. Coming from one such family, she remembers how her grandfather never spoke of things left behind. Or even the pain. There had to be a space for catharsis where people could share their own experience of Partition and help personalise its history.
		+
		+	Like the phulkari coat Pritam Kaur Mianwali, then 22, brought with her when she fled from Gujranwala. "When Pritam Kaur crossed the border with a bag slung across her shoulder she had just this phulkari coat among her few precious possessions-a small comfort in her traumatic sojourn, and a reminder of happier days." Likewise, Bhagwan Singh Maini, then 30, carried with him a leather briefcase that held his degrees as well as his property documents. They got married in the refugee camp in 1948. "These (the coat and the leather briefcase) are a testimony to the life they lost, and found, together," says Desai.
		+
		+	The Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust (TAACHT), which is housed in the 150-year-old Town Hall in Amritsar, is a repository of art, artefact, documents and oral histories. Opened in October 2016, it is spread across three rooms and will eventually have seven galleries across 16,000 square feet. There will also be a gallery of hope. "That's why this museum is there. To heal," says Desai.

← Older revision		Revision as of 13:35, 4 January 2018
Line 62:		Line 62:

	The Indian Museum director added that the mummy is bound to have suffered degeneration in the early years when preservation methods were non-existent. “It is bound to have undergone some wear and tear then. But ever since it was placed inside the protected cabinet, it has been wellpreserved. Or else, it would have disintegrated,“ he claimed.		The Indian Museum director added that the mummy is bound to have suffered degeneration in the early years when preservation methods were non-existent. “It is bound to have undergone some wear and tear then. But ever since it was placed inside the protected cabinet, it has been wellpreserved. Or else, it would have disintegrated,“ he claimed.
		+
		+	= Living Museum of Urur-Olcott Kuppam =
		+	[http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/museum-mithu-sen-subodh-gupta-tm-krishna-kishwar-desai-dayanita-singh/1/939461.html Chinki Sinha , An equal music “India Today” 8/5/2017]
		+
		+	In Poramboke, which means land outside the purview of assessed land records, Magsaysay awardee T.M. Krishna sings "it is not for you, nor for me, it is for the community, it is for the earth". It sums up his choice of "unusual locations", like the living museum that is the fishing hamlet of Urur-Olcott Kuppam, to start what he called conversations in 2014 in a bid to democratise Carnatic music. To take it to the man whose ear it had not fallen on thus far. To the people who could not afford his ticketed concerts. For them, he would sing, in the mornings.
		+
		+	"I see it as a metaphor for possibility," says Krishna. "We remain isolated. How can we listen and talk?"
		+
		+	Krishna recounts an incident over the phone. "I first heard it at the festival (the vizha that Krishna conducts every year in the village). I was walking through the bylanes of the village asking people to come to the performance space when I heard it." He is talking about the paraiattam, a form of drumming traditionally associated with funerals. But it is actually about caste, which extends to ritual, food, attire, even music. So the mridangam, thavil and parai are not mere musical instruments but representations of the caste hierarchy. All are made of animal hide-mridangam from goatskin, thavil from buffalo skin on one side and goatskin on the other and parai from cowhide. And in the prevalent social order, the mridangam, presumed to be a divine instrument, was the preserve of the upper castes, the thavil of the intermediate castes and parai of the Dalits. "The drumming," says Krishna, "is loud and passionate and you have to dance to it. If a person does not dance or move his body to the beat of the parai, he is presumed to be dead, they say."
		+
		+	He danced to it. When he heard it first, on the street, and later on the stage, at the end of the festival.

	= (Sexualised) Museum of Unbelonging =		= (Sexualised) Museum of Unbelonging =

← Older revision		Revision as of 03:31, 4 January 2018
Line 75:		Line 75:

	So her museum is a carnival, a celebration, an imaginary world. One in which there are no forevers. She gives away her babies and finds new ones.		So her museum is a carnival, a celebration, an imaginary world. One in which there are no forevers. She gives away her babies and finds new ones.
		+
		+	= Museum of collectibles from home and the universe =
		+	[http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/museum-mithu-sen-subodh-gupta-tm-krishna-kishwar-desai-dayanita-singh/1/939461.html Chinki Sinha , The boat and other things “India Today” 8/5/2017]
		+
		+	I don't think about what I collect. I just collect," says artist Subodh Gupta. Like the root he bought in Kochi or the figurine in a little antique store. A gold-plated potato, used utensils, entire kitchens bought from slums, boats but no river, and statues and figures from his native Khagaul in Bihar and elsewhere.
		+
		+	He has built massive structures in steel and brass, played around with cowdung. The associative power of his works is what gives them the scale they have attained.
		+
		+	He might buy his utensils in wholesale markets, but they have lost their particularity. There is rural and global, nostalgia and industrialisation. You can capture the tension only if you have had that prolonged struggle with self and identity.
		+
		+	Yet, he won't indulge you with a narrative. The art must be abstract at all costs. His abstraction is bent on drawing out the essentials, almost squeezing them to communicate the intangible.
		+
		+	All his life he had wanted to get away from the small railway town where he grew up. He escaped finally, only to find the past informing everything that he does in his present.
		+
		+	"I started my work with whatever I had seen in my childhood," he says. "Who knows who we are? Our mind has so much power. We are holding everything within us."
		+
		+	His museum is a liminal space. It has everything from the past that is getting transformed into the future. Like the book of recipes where he is currently documenting the memory of food.
		+
		+	"I find my planet on my plate," he says. He is in communion with his universe that is a collection of objects soon to be lost to history. Like the mixing bowl in his studio. Cast in stone, it has a red and white chequered cloth, a gamcha, and kneaded dough. It sums up the churning of the universe in a utensil, the turbulence, the thickness of identity, the malleability of form and shape. And yet it is as simple as saying it is part of where we come from.
		+
		+	"It is part of us. A memory. An ongoing thing of archiving which is so fleeting," he says. Memory has poetic licence. It goes back and forth, it edits and reconfigures. His museum then is a nostalgist's landscape.

← Older revision		Revision as of 03:30, 4 January 2018
Line 62:		Line 62:

	The Indian Museum director added that the mummy is bound to have suffered degeneration in the early years when preservation methods were non-existent. “It is bound to have undergone some wear and tear then. But ever since it was placed inside the protected cabinet, it has been wellpreserved. Or else, it would have disintegrated,“ he claimed.		The Indian Museum director added that the mummy is bound to have suffered degeneration in the early years when preservation methods were non-existent. “It is bound to have undergone some wear and tear then. But ever since it was placed inside the protected cabinet, it has been wellpreserved. Or else, it would have disintegrated,“ he claimed.
		+
		+	= (Sexualised) Museum of Unbelonging =
		+	[http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/museum-mithu-sen-subodh-gupta-tm-krishna-kishwar-desai-dayanita-singh/1/939461.html Chinki Sinha , Collectors Additions “India Today” 8/5/2017]
		+
		+	[[File: Dolls Museum , India Today , May 8,2017 .jpg\| Dolls Museum , India Today , May 8,2017 \|frame\|500px]]
		+
		+	Her first baby was Jack. He wears tattered clothing and was a doll she shared with her sister Mou, the one whose name the Museum of Unbelonging (MOU) echoes. "We had Jill too," says Mithu, "but she died in an operation. My sister told me not to give Jack to anybody." Part of the much-acclaimed curated project-After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India 1947/1997-at the Queens Museum in New York in 2015, it described Sen's work thus, "Displayed as a phantasmagoric fantasy, the work comments on the duality of eroticism, charged both with control and liberation."
		+
		+	"Our hearts are museums of memories," says Mithu. And so there are deities, a dog mating with a human, a terracotta man with a large phallus, puppets, a seahorse with a curled tail, a pair of binoculars, hair clips, a stuffed liger and a leopard, a black rose, white rose...
		+
		+	She calls the objects in her museum her babies. They are a cataloguing of her emotions, and emotion, as the great French philosopher Gaston Bachelard said, "is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost". Mithu has always seen herself as "near poets" rather than "near historians".
		+
		+	So her museum is a carnival, a celebration, an imaginary world. One in which there are no forevers. She gives away her babies and finds new ones.

← Older revision		Revision as of 03:28, 4 January 2018
Line 62:		Line 62:

	The Indian Museum director added that the mummy is bound to have suffered degeneration in the early years when preservation methods were non-existent. “It is bound to have undergone some wear and tear then. But ever since it was placed inside the protected cabinet, it has been wellpreserved. Or else, it would have disintegrated,“ he claimed.		The Indian Museum director added that the mummy is bound to have suffered degeneration in the early years when preservation methods were non-existent. “It is bound to have undergone some wear and tear then. But ever since it was placed inside the protected cabinet, it has been wellpreserved. Or else, it would have disintegrated,“ he claimed.
−
−	~~= Museum of collectibles from home and the universe =~~
−	~~[http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/museum-mithu-sen-subodh-gupta-tm-krishna-kishwar-desai-dayanita-singh/1/939461.html Chinki Sinha , The boat and other things “India Today” 8/5/2017]~~
−
−	I don't think about what I collect. I just collect," says artist Subodh Gupta. Like the root he bought in Kochi or the figurine in a little antique store. A gold-plated potato, used utensils, entire kitchens bought from slums, boats but no river, and statues and figures from his native Khagaul in Bihar and elsewhere.
−
−	~~He has built massive structures in steel and brass, played around with cowdung. The associative power of his works is what gives them the scale they have attained.~~
−
−	He might buy his utensils in wholesale markets, but they have lost their particularity. There is rural and global, nostalgia and industrialisation. You can capture the tension only if you have had that prolonged struggle with self and identity.
−
−	~~Yet, he won't indulge you with a narrative. The art must be abstract at all costs. His abstraction is bent on drawing out the essentials, almost squeezing them to communicate the intangible.~~
−
−	~~All his life he had wanted to get away from the small railway town where he grew up. He escaped finally, only to find the past informing everything that he does in his present.~~
−
−	~~"I started my work with whatever I had seen in my childhood," he says. "Who knows who we are? Our mind has so much power. We are holding everything within us."~~
−
−	~~His museum is a liminal space. It has everything from the past that is getting transformed into the future. Like the book of recipes where he is currently documenting the memory of food.~~
−
−	"I find my planet on my plate," he says. He is in communion with his universe that is a collection of objects soon to be lost to history. Like the mixing bowl in his studio. Cast in stone, it has a red and white chequered cloth, a gamcha, and kneaded dough. It sums up the churning of the universe in a utensil, the turbulence, the thickness of identity, the malleability of form and shape. And yet it is as simple as saying it is part of where we come from.
−
−	"It is part of us. A memory. An ongoing thing of archiving which is so fleeting," he says. Memory has poetic licence. It goes back and forth, it edits and reconfigures. His museum then is a nostalgist's landscape.

@@ Line 63: / Line 63: @@
 The Indian Museum director added that the mummy is bound to have suffered degeneration in the early years when preservation methods were non-existent. “It is bound to have undergone some wear and tear then. But ever since it was placed inside the protected cabinet, it has been wellpreserved. Or else, it would have disintegrated,“ he claimed.
-= (Sexualised)Museum of Unbelonging =
+= Museum of collectibles from home and the universe =
-[http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/museum-mithu-sen-subodh-gupta-tm-krishna-kishwar-desai-dayanita-singh/1/939461.html Chinki Sinha , Collectors Additions “India Today” 8/5/2017]
+[http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/museum-mithu-sen-subodh-gupta-tm-krishna-kishwar-desai-dayanita-singh/1/939461.html Chinki Sinha , The boat and other things “India Today” 8/5/2017]
-[[File: Dolls Museum , India Today , May 8,2017 .jpg| Dolls Museum , India Today , May 8,2017 |frame|500px]]
+I don't think about what I collect. I just collect," says artist Subodh Gupta. Like the root he bought in Kochi or the figurine in a little antique store. A gold-plated potato, used utensils, entire kitchens bought from slums, boats but no river, and statues and figures from his native Khagaul in Bihar and elsewhere.
-Her first baby was Jack. He wears tattered clothing and was a doll she shared with her sister Mou, the one whose name the Museum of Unbelonging (MOU) echoes. "We had Jill too," says Mithu, "but she died in an operation. My sister told me not to give Jack to anybody." Part of the much-acclaimed curated project-After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India 1947/1997-at the Queens Museum in New York in 2015, it described Sen's work thus, "Displayed as a phantasmagoric fantasy, the work comments on the duality of eroticism, charged both with control and liberation."
+He has built massive structures in steel and brass, played around with cowdung. The associative power of his works is what gives them the scale they have attained.
-"Our hearts are museums of memories," says Mithu. And so there are deities, a dog mating with a human, a terracotta man with a large phallus, puppets, a seahorse with a curled tail, a pair of binoculars, hair clips, a stuffed liger and a leopard, a black rose, white rose...
+He might buy his utensils in wholesale markets, but they have lost their particularity. There is rural and global, nostalgia and industrialisation. You can capture the tension only if you have had that prolonged struggle with self and identity.
-She calls the objects in her museum her babies. They are a cataloguing of her emotions, and emotion, as the great French philosopher Gaston Bachelard said, "is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost". Mithu has always seen herself as "near poets" rather than "near historians".
+Yet, he won't indulge you with a narrative. The art must be abstract at all costs. His abstraction is bent on drawing out the essentials, almost squeezing them to communicate the intangible.
-So her museum is a carnival, a celebration, an imaginary world. One in which there are no forevers. She gives away her babies and finds new ones.
+All his life he had wanted to get away from the small railway town where he grew up. He escaped finally, only to find the past informing everything that he does in his present.

@@ Line 8: / Line 8: @@
 [[Category:India |M ]]
 [[Category:Culture |M ]]
 =Early 21st century museums=
 == Experiences, rather than objects==

← Older revision		Revision as of 03:15, 4 January 2018
Line 75:		Line 75:

	The Indian Museum director added that the mummy is bound to have suffered degeneration in the early years when preservation methods were non-existent. “It is bound to have undergone some wear and tear then. But ever since it was placed inside the protected cabinet, it has been wellpreserved. Or else, it would have disintegrated,“ he claimed.		The Indian Museum director added that the mummy is bound to have suffered degeneration in the early years when preservation methods were non-existent. “It is bound to have undergone some wear and tear then. But ever since it was placed inside the protected cabinet, it has been wellpreserved. Or else, it would have disintegrated,“ he claimed.
		+
		+	= (Sexualised)Museum of Unbelonging =
		+	[http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/museum-mithu-sen-subodh-gupta-tm-krishna-kishwar-desai-dayanita-singh/1/939461.html Chinki Sinha , Collectors Additions “India Today” 8/5/2017]
		+
		+	[[File: Dolls Museum , India Today , May 8,2017 .jpg\| Dolls Museum , India Today , May 8,2017 \|frame\|500px]]
		+
		+	Her first baby was Jack. He wears tattered clothing and was a doll she shared with her sister Mou, the one whose name the Museum of Unbelonging (MOU) echoes. "We had Jill too," says Mithu, "but she died in an operation. My sister told me not to give Jack to anybody." Part of the much-acclaimed curated project-After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India 1947/1997-at the Queens Museum in New York in 2015, it described Sen's work thus, "Displayed as a phantasmagoric fantasy, the work comments on the duality of eroticism, charged both with control and liberation."
		+
		+	"Our hearts are museums of memories," says Mithu. And so there are deities, a dog mating with a human, a terracotta man with a large phallus, puppets, a seahorse with a curled tail, a pair of binoculars, hair clips, a stuffed liger and a leopard, a black rose, white rose...
		+
		+	She calls the objects in her museum her babies. They are a cataloguing of her emotions, and emotion, as the great French philosopher Gaston Bachelard said, "is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost". Mithu has always seen herself as "near poets" rather than "near historians".
		+
		+	So her museum is a carnival, a celebration, an imaginary world. One in which there are no forevers. She gives away her babies and finds new ones.