Designing A Disobedient Show For An Unruly Space

An ongoing exhibition throws light upon ceramic and clay objects made by hereditary and studio-trained potters as well as artists — and their histories — that have never, or rarely, been measured and mapped. Held in a repurposed space of an office building in a corporate park in central Mumbai, it appropriately illustrates the challenges involved in the process of exhibition-making in an ‘unruly’ space; highlights the experience of the art-viewer; and discusses the notion of spatial possibilities in ‘alternate museums’

- Annapurna Garimella

Gustavo Buntnix and Ivan Karp write in their essay “Tactical Museologies,” published in the now classic anthology Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/ Global Transformations (Duke University Press, 2006) that “alternative museums” have developed to address diverse collections, purposes, and audiences. They share a “wish to take advantage of the symbolic capital associated with the idea of the museum,” and yet also seek, sometimes unwittingly, “to present an alternative to the claims of better-established museums to define citizenship.” As has been discussed recently by many scholars working on Indian museums, there are numerous state-sponsored and private museums but very few have active curatorial agendas or concomitant departments of exhibition design and publication. This has led to a situation in which we have buildings, objects, histories, patronage, and audiences, but very few opportunities to develop integrated programmes that can work to link object, history, curation, design, and publics while increasing the capacity of institutions.

Even when there are plans to take exhibition design seriously and induct it into the practice of curation and museology so that the concept is spatialised in a manner that works to provide a counterpoint to or illuminate the curatorial agenda, there are many moments where the design potentially can be hijacked by the idea that design is only a visual element and not a spatial or a curatorial practice. In some instances, the idea also can be prematurely concluded with the thought that “this much design is good enough to pass as designed”, or the space in which the exhibition is installed is often re-purposed for exhibition display, making deep design an onerous and seemingly impossible task.