Re-inhabiting the museum images, through Micro-Ritualistic Environments
This project aims to create micro-ritualistic environments (dioramas) that serve as portals into the cultural, religious, and social practices of different artifacts that exist in museums today. These environments will allow visitors to re-engage, recontextualize, and reinhabit the rich histories of the images and idols that were once plundered, bought, and sold into the art market, and not consumed as aesthetic commodities, but rather as living images that hold significance and meaning beyond their physical forms.
In collaboration with historians and cultural practitioners, the project will forge a framework to build dioramas that recreate cultural biography, social history, and ritualistic acts that were intangible in nature but served a larger social role in keeping the worshiping and veneration of these images alive.
By doing so, the project hopes to offer a speculative curatorial direction that produces new rituals of coexistence for the current displaced and multicultural landscape, while providing a unified sense of shared empathy in our histories.
De-colonizing Museums
Images and Idols stored away in glass boxes with a mere barcode and number tag concealing their past, divorces the rich cultural biography and social history behind these objects.
Currently the project focuses on the Indian context, where idols undergo the process of sthapana before being placed on the pedestal for worship in temples. Sthapana is a process of giving life to a non-being/material form, bringing it to life with the community as witnesses, and establishing its being.
-
The image of Buddha, for example, holds multiple significances and meanings in different parts of the world, sharing different ritualistic perspectives will help us understand and appreciate our differences.
Rishi Mandal Yantra (traditional examples of diagram based portals)
These portals would give us insights into local specificity into which they were born, consecrated, enlivened and maintained with acts of ritualistic devotional practices, providing a platform for sharing the divine reality of different cultures.
-------------
Jain Temple, The MET
Positioning of objects
The study of cultural historical objects requires sensitive positioning as their context may clash. For example, at The MET, Jain sculptures are placed alongside Kamasutra sculptures. To de-colonize them, I suggest using rituals, sthapana, and community performances to bring intangible concepts into tangible forms, fostering social healing and reconstruction.
(On-going work)