Ongoing at the DakshinaChitra museum in Chennai is their yearly three-day LangFest, featuring a series of events ranging from talks on artificial intelligence, cinema and art featuring experts from across the country, to music and theatre performances and film screenings. Every month, the museum, which aptly describes itself as ‘living-history museum’, hosts at least one such event, besides folk and cultural performances.
There was a time when museums were perceived as “old, stodgy places with some artworks hanging on the wall or sculptures placed in large rooms”, but this is no longer the case, says Harish Vasudevan, acting director-Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), Bengaluru. MAP’s ‘events’ tab on their website brims over with symposiums, workshops and film screenings, which are themed not just on art, but associated topics such as inclusion and gender. The same goes for the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, which has specific outreach programmes for children, teenagers and adults. All these museums have dynamic social media pages as well, to cater to their Gen Z and millennial participants, who form a good number of the visitors.
Across the west, museums have been taking on a larger role as learning centres rather than being just exhibition centres, and new-age private museums in India are following suit, opening up a whole new world to the public. “Museums are not just about preservation and conservation; they are also about transformation and knowledge-making,” says Anitha Pottamkulam, director of culture, DakshinaChitra. For example, people in STEM usually have no access to humanities, and it’s up to museums to make their visits transformative, she says. “If a scientist listens only to science, the person will remain in a bubble, while exploring humanities can lead to a deeper understanding of the world. A work of art or a painting might leave a lasting impression, even if not immediately apparent.” Keeping this in mind, one of their recent invitees was science historian Janvi Falke, who works at the intersection of arts and science.
It was with the goal of creating such a museum-going culture that MAP was created, says Harish. “Art has the power to transform individuals and society, and a museum should provoke people’s interest in art. Our dream is to get a philistine to walk in to attend an event, get curious about art and then spend time in the museum.”
These museums don’t restrict their exhibits and interactive experiences to history, but all forms of art and culture. “A culturally curious person doesn’t only go for history, they also look for contemporary music, dance and other forms of entertainment, which, when curated responsibly and presented in a non-traditional way, can also enrich, not just entertain,” says Anitha. At a recent Manipur folk festival conducted at DakshinaChitra, the audience was invited to dance at the finale with the folk artists, who described the various dance forms and their significance before each performance. Contrary to the popular notion, younger people are open to these cultural experiences, they say.
Such talks and events can also create communities, spaces for people to find other like-minded people and start new dialogues, at a time when there’s the risk of isolation due to technological developments, says Harish.
The subjects of these talks and seminars thus go beyond art and history, to those of contemporary relevance such as environment and conservation. The Moplah House at DakshinaChitra, an exhibit in itself, houses a permanent hybrid art exhibition – The Living Ocean – that examines the profound impact of climate change on marine environments through artworks, films, interactive infographics and art installations. Recently, MAP had discussions on queers and workshops in partnership with Greenpeace around climate change and its impact on women, while their six-month series ‘The Radical Seventies,’ was created for youth to engage with older classic films that resonate with contemporary times.
It’s also high time museums engaged younger people and experimented with different forms of engagement, says Pradeep Chakravarty, historian, who often conducts themed museum walks in Chennai for the public. “At the partition museum in Amritsar, they use video images to tell stories, Sarmaya in Mumbai also does a good job in this regard. Young people get all their information from Instagram these days, and need to be taught how to view an artefact in a museum.”
Offering immense possibilities for engagement and learning are the various government museums in the country which have the richest collections of all, but they often lack the dynamic engagement needed to attract large crowd, admits Kavita Ramu, IAS, director of museums, TN. “We do conduct gallery walks and seminars on specific days, but events and interactive experiences have the potential to reinvent the space. Hosting interactive exhibitions and cultural shows also have huge tourist scope and can play a role in helping local businesses in related fields.” Many people perceive museums as static spaces meant only for history buffs, and hosting workshops, film screenings, or heritage walks will not just bring in students, artists, tourists, and the general public but foster a sense of ownership among the people, she says.