COLLECTOR’S FANCY
Five artists and their museums and what it means for their artistic enterprise
Five artists and their museums and what it means for their artistic enterprise
WHEN IT OPENED IN April 2012 in a 19th-century house in the Cukurcuma neighbourhood of Istanbul, Turkish author Orhan Pamuk’s Masumiyet Muzesi, based on his 2008 novel The Museum of Innocence, had a few dozen ceramic dogs, a tricycle, old clocks, soda bottles, clips of films, lottery tickets, a single earring and 4,213 cigarette butts. The last had been touched by nostalgia and melancholy, as well as by Fusun, the object of the book’s wealthy protagonist Kemal’s obsessive desire.
Pamuk’s grand ode to love and memory was actually a call for “small and economical museums that address our humanity”, as he had said at the time. And so if Mithu Sen’s (Sexualised) Museum of Unbelonging is a single vitrine of what the Queens Museum in New York described as “toy-like absurd objects from her personal archive”, artist Subodh Gupta’s studio is an industrial shed where he welds metal and entire
universes. “Every artist has a museum,” he says. “I collect museums.” Photographer Dayanita Singh believes “large museums need to open doors to smaller ones”, and has built museums within museums. Carnatic vocalist T.M. Krishna treats an entire fishing hamlet as his living museum, mining artefacts that he can showcase, such as a forgotten drumbeat or a lost way of life. As Eric Miller, director, World Storytelling Institute, describes it, “A ‘living museum’ is that in which the objects on display are still in everyday use, and the museum guides include members of the community.” It’s a museum without walls, where everything—celebration, mourning, worship, song and dance—showcases a living heritage.
The Museum of Partition is more than a traditional museum. As Kishwar Desai, Chair of The Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust that manages it, says, it’s a place for catharsis, a “space to heal”.
The future of museums, Pamuk believes, should begin at home, situating objects in their context instead of uprooting them, telling stories of the everyday rather than a grand narrative, documenting personal, not official history, encompassing the experience of humans, not empires.
No longer then does a museum have to be a graveyard of history, showcasing a past way of life through objects frozen in time and space, and viewed through a lens of modernity. Sen’s museum is a dare to permanence. It morphs, shifts and challenges the notion of museum as mausoleum. Long ago, when her parents were packing up to leave yet another city on yet another transfer, she had felt the pain in her being. When her father asked her if everything had been packed, she had screamed ‘no’, because the empty rooms held so much. She had then run to a plant in the backyard and whispered to it. In this life, we shall never meet again. That’s how unbelonged she had felt leaving empty rooms and living trees behind. She treats the objects in her museum as “children” from her affairs with travelling, unfettered by borders, ethnicities, sexuality or form.
Museums in themselves have no political power, yet the very process of archiving can be turned into a political project. It is this tyranny of form and structure that the five artists profiled here seek to liberate their museums from.