When Dayanita Singh’s Museum Bhavan moved, art aficionados learnt about the Art of Losing from Aveek Sen.
Housed in the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) since December 2015, photographer Dayanita Singh’s Museum Bhavan is a family of nine mini-museum structures that both conceal and display over 800 images. Despite this proliferation of images, one’s engagement with Museum Bhavan is not entirely visual. Each museum has a name, two are siblings, and some are growing into each other. Each museum is a moveable structure that, along with the museum furniture, seems to choreograph the manner in which one enters, moves, sits, thinks and remembers within it. It is the form of Museum Bhavan that one seems to be in conversation with, the space itself that dictates the experience that one leaves with.
One returns to Museum Bhavan on the evening of the 1 May, to find that the File Museum, the Museum of Little Ladies, the Kochi Pillar, and the Museums of Chance, Machines, Photography and Furniture have shed their images to reveal their skeletons. One finds oneself, now, in a museum of emptiness, left to reorient oneself to the bare bones of its structures, to confront the ultimate mementomori: to negotiate loss.
Amidst these empty structures, one witnesses a conversation led by writer Aveek Sen on the ‘Art of Losing’. Neatly sidestepping the jargon-filled precincts of art history and art criticism, the conversation delves into literature and lived experience. Sen explores the relationship between the making and unmaking of art, and the fundamental processes of the human body and mind. What do we get, he asks, when art, which must somehow deal with the “first and last things” , finds itself embodied in something more intermediate: in space, in chambers, in structures? What happens when we take this space, this unit of architecture, this museum, perhaps, and divest it of its collection?
What are we left with?
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