Articles

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The Dream Museum Project

The Dream Museum Project, a collaborative venture of Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi and Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, travelled to the recently concluded India Art Summit. Suruchi Khubchandani examines the salient features of this project that cuts across borders.

As the domain of art and culture across the globe transgresses to fathom and formulate the possibilities of alternative genres and accompanied practices, a consecutive stage to follow in definite terms is accommodating a discursive space as well as an institutional support to back the gesture. An organised, legitimate space to restore, signify, collect, and archive the cultural products has been traditionally nurtured in the premise of a museum.
The stream of political and cultural hierarchy, which has held reign in controlling and exercising this interplay, has largely indulged in a diffusion of the sorts with the genesis of technology and change in patterns of visual consumption and perception.

It is of pertinent relevance stating Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s words of view(1) proposing the devolution of “the official business of state agencies” in archiving the acts of visual consumption in the public domain and as a matter of everyday life “as something anyone could do, and everyone is expected to.” Attributing the likes of popular culture as source of archival resources finding new uses and meaning, the process of archiving in itself has undergone a substantial metamorphosis.

Circling and grounding the purview of the ‘public’ in the sphere of controlling, accessing and defining the matter and polemics of a veritable collection is ‘What is your Dream Museum?’ project. A community project aiming to offer the public a platform to consider and delineate their ideal museum, the ‘Dream Museum Project’ is a collaborative venture of Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi and Asia Art Archive (AAA), Hong Kong.

The project, deciphered in various modes, garners an open-ended approach to activate the thinking process of the communities across age-groups and locations about the ‘where, how and why’ of the institution called ‘museum.’ The project got initiated in Hong Kong under the aegis of the Asia Art Archive, a comprehensive research and documentation centre of contemporary Asian art. A major museum conference organized by AAA ‘Shifting Sites: Cultural Desire and the Museum’ to reinterpret the role of museum in a software-freaked time acted as a prelude to the ‘Dream Museum Project’ and throughout the period of 2008, AAA asked various communities in Hong Kong to describe the kind of museum they aspire for. The project was initiated by distributing specially designed Dream Museum Cards to the public as well as by organising artist workshops at AAA’s booth at ART HK 08, the international art fair in Hong Kong. Selected responses received as the out product of the initiative were exhibited for public viewing at the end of the project. Moreover, an interactive website named www.dreammuseum.org was launched at the end of the year (2008) displaying selected responses and the photo gallery for the campaign.

An animated replay of similar action captured the space at Stall A-10 at the India Art Summit held at New Delhi from 19-22nd August as the ‘Dream Museum’ travelled to India as its 2nd destination. The project has materialised on the Indian ground with collaboration with the Devi Art Foundation (DAF) on two instances.  Anupam Poddar, Director of DAF, was the board member of the AAA, and other instance seeming a matter of a broader understanding that there isn’t a better institution in terms of presenting and promoting the cut-edge and new media art practices in the country, thus bringing change in the viewership pattern of the audience in question.

The project’s verbatim description, superscribed on the Dream Museum Cards, spurts ideas of a museum with wings, a museum without walls, an underwater museum, a museum that folds in to your pocket. Devi Art Foundation, from July 10th to September 10th 2009, extensively campaigned in various schools, universities, art organisations and among interested parties in the city, distributing the cards and helping them indulge in imaginative cerebrations about a virtual museum they would love to experience.

The end product was a resplendent, colourful spread of cards clinging to the display wall at the India Art Summit booth. With the positioning of tables and mooras, it acted as an interactive joint for children and art enthusiasts to uncover the idea of the museum of their choice. The palette of curious responses ranged from a mobile museum, mushroom museum, chocolate museum to tree museum.

Considering one of the most evoking perception of the dream museum as a ‘7-Eleven Store,’ AAA is in the process to present the Dream Museum Convenience Store for ART HK-09 with a selection of this year’s Dream Museum collection responses in the form of written cards, photos and objects. Like ‘7- Eleven,’ AAA wishes to create an environment that is accessible and familiar, thereby challenging the traditional perceptions of the museum as a place of authority and exclusivity. In an equivalent gesture as Hong Kong embarked on the ambitious West Kowloon Cultural District project this year, AAA called on the community to build a collection for the Dream Museum by sending in an object or uploading an image on the www.dreammuseum.org. An assortment of curious responses can be accessed at the website mentioned.

The initiative is not meant to materialise into an aspirant physical museum of any sorts though. The project has rather culminated as a deliberate reflective exercise to awaken the slumber spelled on the whole terminology and function of the museum as such. After India, the project might travel to Singapore and Thailand to extend the awareness.

Images Courtesy: Asia Art Archive.

(Suruchi Khubchandani is an art writer based in Delhi. She has done M.V.A. in Art History & Aesthetics from M.S.University, Baroda. Email: sur14in@gmail.com)