Another kind of laboratory

The Mumbai Art Room, a south Mumbai-based art exhibition space founded in 2011, is set to break new ground by taking emerging Indian and international curators under its wing. Affording budding curators the opportunity to hone their management and leadership skills — among other things, a Curatorial Advisory Committee of art world luminaries and the centre’s newly appointed managing director Eve Lemesle will nurture their talents.

The Curatorial Lab will be announced at the Mumbai Art Room’s the Annual Benefit on September 20 along with the name of an emerging curator, who is being nominated by practicing curators in India and abroad, and he or she will be invited to submit a proposal for one show of four annual exhibitions. Hence, four young curators stand to benefit from the programme each year.

The benefit will also see the exhibition of art works by renowned artists Dayanita Singh and Subodh Gupta. Ms Singh, whose highly original photography exhibits continue to push the art form’s boundaries, explains her latest tactile work, Museum Bhavan, which involves gorgeous hand-crafted boxes containing books or “pocket museums”. “In the box you have nine museums. The person who acquires the box would have to decide how to display the museums — in a single row, in many rows, bunched up or just two pages open at a time. In doing so, they would have to start thinking of possible connections between the works, and slowly that will start determining how and where they display the miniature exhibitions, in pocket museum. Or like me they can design a jacket with nine pockets and travel with the museums, who knows what forms people will find once they own Museum Bhavan?”

Explaining her creative process, she said, “When the nine mobile museums in Museum Bhavan began to find homes in more formal institutions, I was extremely happy but also a little sad. I had thought the nine museums would live in my house, which would become the Museum Bhavan. I then started to find a form that would allow my museums to be simultaneously disseminated in more domestic spaces: as a result, the larger wooden museums transformed into the pocket museum. And now both you and I can own one, or two, or as many as you like.”

Shedding light on the curatorial lab, Ms Lemesle said the idea of transforming Mumbai Art Room stemmed from the observation that today India has more and more opportunities for curators. “However, a city like Mumbai still lacks spaces where emerging curators can practice and experiment in a non-commercial context. This was a good time for the institution to shift its focus and respond to the current needs of the art scene,” she says.

She adds that along with curatorial mentorship, the curator will benefit from mentorship on ground for the production of the show – her area of expertise. “Our curatorial lab will support two very important aspects of exhibition making: the conceptual approach as well as all space-related components of the exhibition. In parallel, each curator will be invited to think beyond the gallery to develop public outreach programmes that could take place anywhere in the city, and we will encourage programmes that engage with diverse communities and partners,” she says.

But what qualities, in an expert’s opinion, makes a good curator? Says Ms Lemesle “Curating is a complex practice which requires a constant dialogue with the artists, theoretical knowledge of art history, understanding of contemporary culture, and relevance in the selection of high quality artworks, ability to multitask from writing to transforming spaces or climbing on a ladder to do lighting. In our Mumbai context, patience is also a good quality to have!”