Bengaluru, Karnataka, has historically been the metaphorical melting pot of cultures, ideas, and perspectives in India. The city’s cosmopolitan mix has created a need for constant innovation and conscious rethinking, making it a fertile testing ground for new methodologies and modalities. The three exhibitions that opened between September and October in Bengaluru do exactly that. While intersections in their themes might have been merely coincidental, their similarity lies in the fact that they each push different aspects of conscientious exhibition design.

PLAY: Experiments with Indian Miniatures

KAASH space opened its doors on October 08, 2023. The exhibition featured the works of three contemporary artists who work with miniature: Dr Vijay Siddramappa Hagargundgi, Riyazuddin, and Gargi Chandola. Each of the artists represented a distinct school of painting, and thereby a unique aesthetic. Dr Vijay Hagargundgi’s lyrical artwork harks back to the sensuous and graceful styles of the Surpur school; Riyazuddin’s intricately detailed and delightfully embellished work in the Rajput style of miniature painting creates a festive atmosphere; and Gargi Chandola’s contemporary take on the Pahari school of painting brought contemporary dilemmas to the fore through a romantic painterly sensibility. The diversity of the artists’ preoccupations demanded that each of them deserved their unique spaces of experience.

The sensory experience was at the forefront of the exhibition design at KAASH. The venue is divided into three smaller galleries, and a central lobby allows for the creation of separate zones of experience. The central lobby featured a room within a room: a structure constructed to project life-sized images of South Indian miniatures from the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Standing within this space, the viewer is surrounded on three sides by images of gods and other deities. Moving on from this projection chamber to the first gallery, in the centre of which was a tall four-sided pillar, on each face of the pillar was an exquisitely detailed painting by Dr. Vijay Hagargundgi.

This particular positioning of the works requires the viewer to circumambulate the pillar, almost as if one were within the sanctum sanctorum of a temple. Illuminated by the soft glow of oil lamps, with the fragrance of fresh jasmine garlands wafting in the air, and the sounds of Carnatic music, the gallery provided all the familiar sights and sounds to create an ambience within which one could not only view the works of art but experientially relate to them. On the other side of the lobby was a darkened room featuring the works by Riyazuddin. The works, which feature images of the Indian deities such as Ganesha, Krishna, and Radha celebrating festivals, hand-painted on leather, were internally lit lightboxes that were the only source of light in the room. One entered into a zone of darkness, forced to focus on the row of lightboxes that created an illuminated horizon in a void. The third gallery was divided by a fabric screen with drawings by Dr Vijay Hagargundgi, a central installation of oil lamps on one side, and three richly saturated paintings by Gargi Chandola on the other, which effectively functioned as the finale of the exhibition.

The design of the exhibition encouraged a movement between zones that were designed to create distinct moods and environments within which the works were to be experienced. Exhibition designer and Indian architect David Joe Thomas elaborates on the experience by saying, "From the beginning, the idea was to create a sort of spatial arrangement where the collection of works by each of the artists could be experienced by themselves. And the word ‘experience has been in our purview the entire time and the attempt was to devise scenography that creates a heightened experience of the artists’ works within each gallery.”

Drawing[s] From Raje: The Patient Search for Architecture

An exhibition of architectural drawings and sketches by the late architect Anant Raje, curated by Shubhra Raje, opened at Bangalore International Centre on September 17, 2023. This exhibition highlights how a simple spatial intervention can guide movement within an exhibition and therefore the reception and perception of content. The exhibition presented six projects, from an oeuvre of over sixty, focusing on the development of these elements of connection.

These were distributed over three cellae on one side of the gallery with a wide aisle to the side. The clear, suspended acrylic partitions of the cellae featured A0-sized architectural drawings of various projects by Raje, and on the wall of the aisle were more informal drawings—pages from sketchbooks and journals with rough drafts and studies. The visitor enters to read the curatorial note and moves into the aisle from which they enter the cellae one at a time. The process of moving between the cellae where formal architectural plans were displayed and the aisle where one saw the architect’s informal drawings allowed for a movement between two frames of mind.

The fact that each of the cellae had gaps between them from which one could always see the aisle in the periphery was a conscious design decision to maintain at all times a presence in two states; a porosity that enabled ideas and concepts to permeate through spatial divisions. Ar. Shubhra Raje spoke about guided movement between the two zones in the exhibition and said, “Every time you zig-zagged in and out of the cellae, the sketches, taken from 40 years of sketchbooks, became the background for the projects—almost suggesting through their spatial layout, that when you are in the cell of the project, the sketches visible in the periphery, work in the same way that a sketchbook functions for a creator."

Book of Gold: The Kanchana Chitra Ramayana of Banaras

Curated by (late) Kavita Singh and Parul Singh, the exhibition opened at the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP) on September 16, 2023. The exhibition is a straightforward presentation of folios from a now-dispersed album containing illustrations of Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas, made for the royal court of Banaras, spanning from 1796 to 1814. The design of such an exhibition faces multiple challenges: presenting historical content through a neutral lens that holds space for multiple perceptions, giving the contemporary exhibition-goer a fair sense of what would have been the original form of archival material while maintaining its integrity at the same time, creating equitable access for all visitors, and creating multiple points of entry to a layered theme.

Vineet Kajrolkar, Exhibition Manager at MAP in Bangalore, speaking of accessibility, says, “We give a lot of importance to inclusion and access. We think about accessibility from the very beginning. At MAP we believe that the exhibition design shouldn’t overpower the artwork. The design should aid the artwork and movement. To create access. We also have guidelines set in place for exhibition design like the heights at which artworks must be installed, or creating islands and vitrines not exceeding 800-900 mm in height, with room underneath for wheelchair access.”

The artworks on view at the exhibition were amply supported by texts and timelines on the walls and a projection of a Ramlila documentation to acquaint the visitor with the cultural and historical context within which the works were produced. Accessibility being a core philosophy of the Museum, allows the curators and designers to imaginatively strategise the exhibition experience. While the straightforward display of the gilded paintings created a neutral point of visual experience, tactile interventions such as a magnetic board encouraging visitors to 'create' their miniature painting, a monitor with a digital flipbook containing scans of the original manuscript, and positioning two paintings within a vitrine on a wooden stand resembling an open book, offer a wholesome and multidimensional understanding of the subject matter.