The museum takes on a new avataar

In many peoples' minds, going to a museum is associated with childhood outings. For some, the experience of walking through musty corridors, laden with display cases, studded with art, antiquities, reliquaries and animal heads, enhanced by the taxidermist's skill, is virtually taxing. For others though, such encounters open up magical vistas. However, not too many urban denizens actually visit city museums on a regular basis. Mostly, as people claim to have been there, have done that as kids.

And so, when the Bhau Daji Lad Museum (BDL), the oldest in Mumbai, recently opened an exhibition of well-known artist-sculptor, Sudarshan Shetty's works, visitors were pleasantly surprised to see the contemporary displayed cheek-by-jowl with the historical. Tasneem Mehta, the dynamic honorary director of BDL museum, who has earlier raised a substantial corpus for the museum's restoration via an ambitious private partnership with a business house, conceived this fabulous idea that allows the enthusiast a chance to see the "art of the present in a historic space."

Shetty's aptly named exhibition,  This too shall pass, is the first of a series of exhibitions, planned by Tasneem Mehta, who has invited eminent artists, alumni from the Sir JJ School of Art to "work with the museum's sumptuous space and legacy of historical objects."

The artist, who often gets his quirky, monumental works cast in Ahmedabad and Baroda, has an affinity to this museum, as he used to walk in the adjoining gardens with his mother.

The exhibition builds on the idea of the larger-than-life object that holds one in thrall, albeit momentarily. But, which too, philosophically put, (like life) will pass. Shetty puts a contemporary spin on the traditional. The foyer of the museum holds the most ambitious work of the show. A life-sized, gold leafed statue, the work, titled SUDARSHAN SHETTY: 1961-2010 is propped in front of an imposing marble statue of Prince Albert. Tilted to resemble the statue of a toppled leader, this gilded figure is balanced with a weighted box. The artist, who draws from an old custom where rulers were weighed in gold, hopes that as the box fills with coins, the statue will begin to stand itself up…. 

Originally called the Victoria and Albert Museum, after the V & A in London, the BDL museum which is 152 years old, has a fascinating collection of objects from the 19th and 20th centuries that speak of the lives and peculiarities of migrant communities who made their way into Mumbai. Tasneem Mehta, keen that wider audiences engage with both the traditional and the contemporary, also has plans to bring an exhibition here from the V & A.
Ahmedabad, as we know, has several private and public museums. Perhaps someone will take the lead and take a fresh look at displays, documentation, docents and marketing, to encourage many more people, particularly school and college students, to engage with the city's legacies. When was the last time you visited the city museum, for instance?

— The writer is an arts consultant. She manages two arts project spaces in Ahmedabad and Mumbai