Primary and high-school education in urban India is predominantly geared through the sciences. Such a mode of education happens to engage feebly with the cultural centres that cities may afford. Most young adults in India may never have visited their city museum. The many students who come from smaller towns often hardly have any cultural spaces like museums or galleries within their place of growing up. This lack of access to the chamber of humanities - quite literally - results in the redefinition of what one means by an “exhibition”. The closest definition of an exhibition for anyone detached thus, from the cultural sphere would be the ‘mela’ - a temporary burst of activity, food and shops mostly organised in a place around the time of an event. For the urban subject, the recent interpretation of the exhibition is also the various ‘conventions’ that are organised for network and exchange between business professionals; or the fairs that are organised amongst certain communities in neighbourhood halls and banquets. While these forms of exhibitions are subsumed largely into the logistics of the market of selling, this course introduces students to forms of exhibitions that are produced through certain institutional structures within the sphere of arts. These include museums, art galleries, cultural institutions and allied spaces which dialogue with their counterparts offering soft channels for exposure and education. Such spaces institutionally locate curation within certain frames of art historical and academic references. Here, structures of display are referencing each other, as well as historically.


The course on ‘Curatorial and Exhibitory Practices’ ran its third cycle this year. The first three weeks of the course were dedicated to slow reading of texts and responding to exhibitions from archives as well as those they have seen in person around the city. In this period, students developed a frame to analyse the premise and environment of the exhibition, understand impulses of collection and archiving, observe methods of organising and displaying, expose to the various formats of exhibiting and thereby understand the process of curation and its spatial questions. These stages were accomplished through rigorous observation, discursive analysis and writing reviews of exhibitions as well as readings. Over these assignments, participants were expected to familiarise themselves with the language of humanities and the arts and delve into the mechanics through which metaphors get produced.

The third week was focused on looking at curatorial practices and untangling the idea of the “curatorial gesture”. A curatorial gesture is the subtle expression by which the intended audience of the exhibition is slid into the curatorial inquiry - by modes of the spatial or programmatic. This gesture finds expression in the overall planning and manifestation of the exhibition in different degrees, giving the inquiry a value and depth of encounter. These aspects were studied and demonstrated in the consideration of the various curators’ works. By the end of the third week, participants were asked to bring ideas or questions that they would potentially like to explore within the framework of an exhibition. Upon a round of discussion, similar themes were clubbed together into groups in order to formulate a curatorial team. Thereafter, these groups were asked to work on a curatorial note that lays out the premise, inquiry and methodology of the curatorial process. This phase consists of writing and research; collection and organisation - in short building an archive within which the curatorial concerns can be held together.