Outlook x Bihar Museum Biennale | Dayanita Singh | Delhi
- 10 months ago
On Museums of the Future
What would museums of the future look like? According to Artist Dayanita Singh, the ‘museums of the future’ need to be “small and portable”.
As a child when Singh visited museums, she often felt intimidated by the alienating effect that museums around the world have on ordinary people. “I wondered, why can’t we carry the museum home with us?”
Now, Singh has created such a museum that can be displayed anywhere, on a table or a shelf. It can be taken home and made part of one’s everyday life. Her ‘Museum Bhavan’ box with its nine accordion-fold museums, is a radical take on museums and memory. The portable photobook brings museums outside of their rigid and colonial confinement of privileged knowledge to the world of the ordinary, the everyday. She wears the museums around in a special jacket with nine pockets to house the nine museums that she can pull out anywhere to show to the curious.
“When we bring a museum outside of its four walls and take it home with us, we change it, give it another life, another personality,” she states.
In an interview with Outlook’s Rakhi Bose, Singh explains the need to reimagine what the future of museums of would be like keeping dissemination in mind.
Singh was one of the panelists at Outlook’s second edition of panel discussions on the preservation and democratisation of museums and the art of everyday. The discussions, held at Delhi’s Bikaner House on June 24, was part of Outlook’s collaboration with Bihar Museum Biennale, whose se condition edition is set to open in August this year.
What would museums of the future look like? According to Artist Dayanita Singh, the ‘museums of the future’ need to be “small and portable”.
As a child when Singh visited museums, she often felt intimidated by the alienating effect that museums around the world have on ordinary people. “I wondered, why can’t we carry the museum home with us?”
Now, Singh has created such a museum that can be displayed anywhere, on a table or a shelf. It can be taken home and made part of one’s everyday life. Her ‘Museum Bhavan’ box with its nine accordion-fold museums, is a radical take on museums and memory. The portable photobook brings museums outside of their rigid and colonial confinement of privileged knowledge to the world of the ordinary, the everyday. She wears the museums around in a special jacket with nine pockets to house the nine museums that she can pull out anywhere to show to the curious.
“When we bring a museum outside of its four walls and take it home with us, we change it, give it another life, another personality,” she states.
In an interview with Outlook’s Rakhi Bose, Singh explains the need to reimagine what the future of museums of would be like keeping dissemination in mind.
Singh was one of the panelists at Outlook’s second edition of panel discussions on the preservation and democratisation of museums and the art of everyday. The discussions, held at Delhi’s Bikaner House on June 24, was part of Outlook’s collaboration with Bihar Museum Biennale, whose se condition edition is set to open in August this year.