Homelands: A 21st Century Story of Home, Away, and All the Places In Between

The Museum collaborated with the British Council to present Homelands, an extraordinary exhibition that introduces the work of 28 modern and contemporary British artists to an Indian audience. In 2009 the British Council extended an invitation to young curators from across the globe to conceptualize an exhibition drawing from the Council’s art collection. Indian Curator Latika Gupta was selected based on her conception of the exhibition Homelands which challenges the quintessential notion of ‘Britishness,’ and explores the churning of identities in a cross cultural, globalised landscape. The works of internationally renowned artists like Anthony Haughey, Mona Hatoum and Zineb Sedira lead the viewer to reevaluate their traditional notions of what constitutes a home, through the exploration of themes including transience, memory and alienation. Homelands was on view at the Museum from April 28 – June 9, 2013, after showing in New Delhi and Kolkata. The exhibition will travel next to Bengaluru.

Left to Right: Tim Hetherington, Dem Ol Bod Ose: Creole: Architecture of Sierra Leone, 2004; Nathan Coley, Camouflage Bayrakli Mosque, 2007; Cornelia Parker, Meteorite lands on Buckingham Palace, 1998 and Meteorite lands on St Paul’s Cathedral, 1998

ZegnArt Public

The Museum partnered with the Ermenegildo Zegna group to commission a work of art that required the artist to respond to the notion of "Public". Seven shortlisted artists were asked to submit project proposals. Reena Kallat was the artist selected for the first edition of ZegnArt Public. While exploring the city’s layered history, Kallat was struck by Mumbai’s changing street names. She was fascinated by the manner in which streets define a city’s imagination and how the names locate people and places in the temporal grid of the city's evolution. Untitled (Cobweb/Crossings), an oversized web formed with hundreds of rubber stamps, wove the history of the city onto the façade of the Museum, with each stamp bearing the colonial name of the city street that has now been replaced by an indigenous one.

Indeed, as an astute young visitor to the Museum pointed out, the form of the web itself was evocative of the twisting, unpredictable streets that make up the jumbled geography of the city. The impact of this landmark public sculpture initiative was immediately apparent, with passers by stopping to spin their own narratives about the stories embedded in this massive work. Biweekly curatorial tours and workshops of the exhibition encouraged the public to engage with ideas and stories about what constitutes an open, urban, democratic space.

“What a heroic accomplishment of respectfully restoring this beautiful building and then breathing life into it for the citizens of Mumbai and the world. Thank you very much.”

“Thanks for a wonderful experience. ‘Preservation and Conservation’ section/people have done a fine job. Educational programs and the initiative in involving students/graduates in Museum’s activities are worth emulating. Best wishes!”

Film, Theatre, and Performance at the Museum Plaza – Coming Soon!

The Museum will shortly begin an exciting series of programmes focusing on film, theatre, music and dance with regular events each week, making weekday evenings more exciting than ever before! This initiative will bring cutting edge cinema from across the world, documentary and feature films on contemporary art and artists, art house cinema and frequent film festivals to the city. The Museum Plaza will also host evenings that offer traditional as well as contemporary music, dance and drama.

Outreach Programmes for The Last Harvest, at the NGMA, Mumbai

The Museum education team conceptualized and implemented a range of exciting outreach programmes for The Last Harvest, an exhibition of paintings by Rabindranath Tagore at the NGMA, Mumbai. Curated by Prof. Siva Kumar from Visva-Bharati University, the exhibition was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, and organized by NGMA in celebration of Tagore 150th birth anniversary. The exhibition travelled in three separate international circuits to New York, Chicago, Paris, London, Rome, Berlin, Toronto and Kuala Lumpur before arriving in Mumbai.

The BDL Museum team’s outreach efforts included interpretive walks through the exhibition for visitors of all ages. Different activity stations were designed to encourage audiences to engage with the diversity in Tagore’s painted forms. One station asked visitors to experiment with doodling, using Tagore’s preferred medium of ink and paper. At another station, participants used their imagination to create mythical creatures inspired by Tagore’s composite animals. A popular favourite was a mask painting activity where participants were asked to represent their feelings and character traits based on Tagore’s faces.

“A most impressive achievement! Congratulations to the entire team and its inspired leadership.”

Ferdawsi's Shahnama

A 300 year old copy of Ferdawsi’s Shahnama from the Museum collection was recently conserved by the team at the INTACH Conservation Lab in the Museum.

The Shahnama, or Book of Kings, is composed of some 50,000 verses written 1000 years ago by the Persian poet Hakim Abul-Qasim Mansur, later known as Ferdawsi Tusi. It recounts the myths, legends and quasi-history of the Persian Empire (modern-day Iran) from the beginning of time until the Arab conquest in the 7th century AD. The epic poem took 33 years to complete, and drew on a range of sources including local and dynastic histories and oral traditions, and the Zoroastrian Avesta. With its accounts of the fantastic and heroic deeds of the Persian kings, the significance of Shahnama has since lain in its association with notions of justice, legitimacy and divine glory. By commissioning their own versions of the Shahnama, later rulers in the region attempted to establish the legitimacy of their rule through this connection with Iran’s earliest kings.

The illustrated manuscript in the Museum collection was badly warped, covered with dust and dirt, with tears, creases and stains. It took 2 conservators, 8 months to restore this manuscript. The binding was first removed and each folio separately dry-cleaned. A hardened layer of dirt was removed with a mixture of solvents and the tears, losses and edges repaired using acid-free tissue paper. A strip lining of the same material was provided to reinforce the spine and the manuscript was finally rebound using the original covers.

Comprised of 550 resin rubber stamps strung together with steel rope and measuring approximately 45 ft in height and 60 ft in width, Kallat’s Untitled (Cobweb/Crossings) weighed over one ton! Installing this work was incredibly challenging. It took 2 days, 70 men, 8 pulleys and 1 crane to secure the web onto the 150 year old facade of the Museum.

Bamboo scaffolding was built across the Museum’s front facade, and pulleys were temporarily fixed on to the roof to assist in lifting the work up from the ground below. The work was pre-assembled on the ground in front of the Museum and wrapped in net to which the ropes were attached. The pulleys, however, proved insufficient, and the work had been lifted only a few feet when this method of installation had to be abandoned. At the end of the day, a crane was required, lifting the work effortlessly into position.

An Institution of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai | Supported by the Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation Restored by INTACH, the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage

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