Embalming a Museum Culture

Sushma Sabnis

From wide eyed awe to boredom relieving yawns and every reaction between these two extremes, is what a museum could evoke in its audience. Artist Waswo X Waswo and his collaborators snip away with satirical scissors to air the long embalmed mummified concepts of museumification in their show, ‘Sleeping through the Museum’ at Sakshi Art Gallery, observes Sushma Sabnis.

Museum is known to summon vivid or vague responses from people. This probably has goaded the museums of today to reconsider a plunge into the abyss of the technological era, replete with their interactive gizmos and activities, in addition to museum staff endowed with a rare combination of actual knowledge of history and a sense of humour. This duality raises the question of the need for a museum at all. Do they actually succeed in being the one-stop archive of humanity and civilizations? Do the artifacts on display hold any value even though they are authenticated by the experts in that field? Who are these assumed credible experts trying to preserve a collection of totem bits of a dead era and its culture? Some questions remain unanswered and leave chasms within the time lines and their corresponding narratives. Artist Waswo X Waswo and his collaborators have concocted a satirical mix of beeswax, terracotta, painted photographs and lithographs and tried to plug some of this chasmic loss in translation between a museum and its viewer. The show titled, ‘Sleeping through the Museum’ is the fabrication of a mock museum within the gallery space and marks out the implications and misinterpretations of the displays which may render them merely as gimmicky markers of their assumed meaningful origins. Waswo displays some of his photography works of museum dioramas in collaboration with three other artists for this show, Rajesh Soni, who has hand painted the photographs in the exhibit, Subrat Behera from Orissa who has created corresponding lithographs and the potter, Shyam Lal Kumhar, who has created the terracotta ‘artifacts’, which bind the whole display together in a single narrative.

There are four exhibits which include painted photographs, lithographs and various terracotta artifacts (nagaras, masks, a giant snake etc.) in vitrines which interplay and together form the story line. Each artist responds to the other’s work and forms his own interpretation, taking off from where the other left. Sometimes by replicating the thought or expressing the exact opposite of it, they bring out perspectives which are distinctly their own yet adhering to the whole theme. This relay of expressions gives an ironic ‘movement’ to the outmoded concept of the museum, where one would encounter stagnation or even a dead end. Conceptually titled, ‘The Migration of Desire, The Resounding Impossibility of Communication, The Eternal Dance of Tribal Drama and The Insidious Danger of Innocence’, the four exhibits focus on how institutions/ museums in their haste to acquire and enhance their collections with valuable/ museum-worthy artifacts or documents often fail to bring out the delicate tones of culture in their exhibits.