It is a fact universally acknowledged {that a} new-age museum in our smartphone period should create excellent selfie spots. Over the previous decade, founders, architects, exhibition designers, curators and artists have needed to additionally think about their works and areas to double up as Instagram backdrops. At Bengaluru’s Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), nevertheless, this isn’t at their “core of building a museum-going culture”, says Abhishek Poddar, the founder of this museum. “At MAP, these interactive elements, whether analogue or digital, are always intentional choices, not add-ons.”
Abhishek Poddar, founder of MAP
| Photo Credit:
Prarthana Shetty
Accommodating this buzzing social media panorama isn’t kowtowing; museums want footfalls too. It is MAP’s mode of participating with these amorphous, captive channels of communication and constructing neighborhood that marks them out. “It’s not something that we prioritise from the very start of conceptualising an exhibition, but it is also something that we’ve come to consider in the process of executing it. It’s the way the world works, and museums and their shows can’t be entirely safe from that,” explains Arnika Ahldag, director of exhibitions and curation at MAP. “But it’s good when it does happen.”
Arnika Ahldag
| Photo Credit:
Special association
She factors to the instance of The Writing Table set up at the recently-opened exhibition titled Shape of a Thought: Letters from Ram Kumar. This wood desk and chair association is stacked with the short-fiction collections and different writings by the artist, free sheafs of clean paper, pens and pencils. Visitors can draw inspiration from the artist’s preoccupations and write a letter to themselves, family members, strangers and even the metropolis. Once finished, they’ll clip it to the twine strung above the desk like festive buntings.
The Writing Table set up
| Photo Credit:
PSAC Studio
A customer writes a letter
| Photo Credit:
Special association
“The initial idea was to find a way for visitors to connect with the physical act of letter-writing. The manner in which picking up a pen and writing on paper causes one to structure one’s thoughts differently than sending out a text message,” Ahldag says, taking us by means of the considering course of behind constructing an exhibition. “But this is the element from Shape of a Thought that has become the most shared on social media; and that’s good with us because it has become yet another way for people to experience, connect and feel Ram Kumar’s practice.”
The modernist writer-painter’s letters may be skilled by means of a number of codecs — facsimile, audio, Indian Sign Language, translations, transcripts, Braille and in regional languages by means of guided walks. These totally different layers that invite interplay “gives a larger group of people the opportunity to get to know his works and thoughts; it allows for them to respond through the medium they’re most comfortable in”, says Poddar. “If they like big screens, we have digitally-stored exhibitions, if they prefer games, we have games. The idea is to simply start them on the journey to embracing and appreciating art.”
Shape of a Thought: Letters from Ram Kumar
| Photo Credit:
PSAC Studio
Breaking down the summary
Since opening in 2023, MAP and its groups have understood that audiences count on greater than frames of paintings held on a wall and being declared as nice artwork. Instead, MAP has been in a position to channel our obsession with smartphones whereas additionally accounting for our wishes to modify off and be tactile in our environments. “The experience of something has become more and more important,” shares Ahldag. For occasion, summary artwork is generally perceived as one thing that’s intimidating. “It’s got a reputation of being only for those in-the-know or seasoned connoisseurs.”
In order to deal with this notion, their exhibitions are put collectively to “build a relationship between the artist and the audience”, she explains. In the Ram Kumar exhibit, there are prompts in the type of questions on brown textual content panels subsequent to every of the summary work that may coax totally different entry-points into the visible for the viewer. This is an extension of their Family Label exercise that enables guests to have a look at the artworks and create a label on what they suppose paintings means, or what they noticed and felt.
Tactile displays at the Shape of a Thought: Letters from Ram Kumar exhibition
| Photo Credit:
Special association
Ahldag has discovered that when these varieties of invitational interventions are “created in connection with an exhibition, people seem to be more interested”. While the inclusion of tactile artwork work in MAP exhibitions is an accessibility function, an integral tenet of MAP’s outreach to have individuals throughout skills acquire entry to artwork, “they’ve also become a way for the general public to experience art with different senses”. And although digital experiences at the museum are cutting-edge, Ahldag and her exhibitions group have discovered “that older ideas like a reading station or an activity desk have worked well” to construct MAP’s public.
“Over the opening weekend, The Writing Table turned out to be a hit with visitors and we’ve already collected handwritten letters of gratitude, dedications and love the size of a thick book,” she tells me. For us [at the museum], it’s candy that we’ve turn out to be a 3rd area in the metropolis for guests to check out a unique tempo, decelerate a little bit, spend time on an exercise that isn’t instantly transformed into a product — these are the intangibles we wish to have the ability to share with our guests,” she concludes.
The Writing Table set up
| Photo Credit:
PSAC Studio
MAP @ the KIA
A customized model of MAP’s technological interventions now exists at Terminal 2 of Bengaluru’s Kempegowda International Airport, an improve from the earlier museum store. At the outposts in the Domestic and International terminals, they’ve their Gallery on Demand, the place travellers can browse the works of Indian artists corresponding to Jamini Roy, Jyoti Bhatt and Suresh Punjabi or search by means of the museum’s whole digitised assortment and even electronic mail them to at least one’s self or pals. There are puzzles created utilizing artworks to go the time. Scan a QR code to digitally mild a lamp: select a lamp from totally different genres of arts and artists and sort out your identify to ignite the flame.
Gallery at the Domestic Terminal
| Photo Credit:
Special association
At the International Terminal, these transiting may get pleasure from an exhibition titled Bhuri Bai: My Life as an Artist. It traces the observe of the Padma Shri award-winning Bhil painter, muralist, and illustrator. It begins from the early Eighties to her more moderen large-scale commissioned works. Scan one other QR code, and you’ll be capable of entry an audio information that goals to reinforce your expertise of these vibrant artworks.
Gallery at the International Terminal
| Photo Credit:
Special association
Artwork from the Bhuri Bai: My Life as an Artist exhibition
| Photo Credit:
Special association
“We want people to experience Indian art and the seed for that can be planted even when they are using screens. It’s been an attempt to cultivate the belief that our history and culture aren’t boring things inside museums, but an exciting shared inheritance,” Poddar states.
Shape of a Thought in on until October 26.
The author and poet is primarily based in Bengaluru.
