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Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, director of The Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2013. Courtesy The Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, Mumbai.
Director of The Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, Tasneem Zakaria Mehta has revitalized the former Victoria & Albert Museum over the course of the past two years, converting it into a “museum about museums.” With over 25 years of experience working with cultural institutions such as the Indian National Trust for Art and Culture Heritage and the National Gallery of Modern Art Mumbai, Zakariahas has earned critical acclaim and international recognition, receiving the UNESCO Asia-Pacific award for cultural conservation in 2005. She spoke to ArtAsiaPacific, on a busy Thursday morning, between meetings and Mumbai traffic, about the museum’s future.
The Bhau Daji Lad has taken this idea of a museum as a place of preservation and—through various artistic interventions—transformed it into a living, breathing thing.
That’s exactly right—into a living museum. Actually when we were constituted as a museum in 1855, we were looking at contemporary culture—it was never a classical or antiquities museum. But at the time artists were excluded. Now, in a way, we’re giving it back to the artists. It’s a riposte, as a curator and museum director, to that particular moment in history.
RANJANI SHETTAR, High Tide for a Blue Moon, 2011, wood from coffee plant and automobile paint. Courtesy the artist and Talwar Gallery, New Delhi/New York.
Can you tell us about your curatorial process and your relationship with the artists you’ve worked with recently?
The show we have on at the moment, Ranjini Shettar’s, is really beautiful. It’s very much about . . . the early beginnings of the museum, which had a strong natural-history focus. The V&A curators were originally always botanists or geologists. That’s why we are right next to the botanical garden, which was conceptualized along with the museum. Likewise, Ranjini’s works are very organic, referring to processes that were key to the museum . . .
As for LN Tallur, I invited him because I like his practice. He looks at tradition in a very tongue and cheek kind of way, yet also with great depth. He investigates the idiosyncrasies and humor that underlay very ponderous, serious areas. We talked about his project over the course of two years—I do that with all the artists.
Jitish Kallat’s 120-part scaffolding-sculpture, which reframes the architecture around it, questions what that past meant and how it can be interpreted. He was going to leave it at the entrance when I said, “Why don’t we take it inside? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have it near [the sculpture of] Albert?” There were many subtexts: one referred to the current history of the museum, another referred to the past and yet another encased him [Albert] in a sense.
JITISH KALLAT, Annexation, 2009, painted black lead and steel. Courtesy The Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, Mumbai.
What are the challenges of working in an existing historical space rather than in a modern exhibition hall?
There are big challenges, but there are also rewards. The building is so overwhelming in a way. It has such a strong identity that to work within it can be difficult. You have to incorporate the architecture into the work, or that is what I’ve tried to do.
Meanwhile, we have just opened this new plaza at the back, it has what we call two special project spaces. We are also creating another building, which is a three-year project . . . I’m also planning on putting up a project for the next Venice Biennale.
LN TALLUR, Hatha Yoga, 2011, nail manufacturing machine, wooden angel, nailed angel. Courtesy The Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, Mumbai.
Do you see the Bhau Daji Lad model as the way forward for museums in India?
We look to museum practice all over the world now. The V&A in London is working with galleries and contemporary artists, so is the Tate, so is the British Museum. Everybody realizes that you can’t just be stuck in the past. History only becomes important when it informs the present, when it can educate and enlighten the present. A museum is not just an altar to the past. It should interrogate it, see the lessons we can learn and how cycles of things happen.
So, yes, I hope so. I hope that are we are laying ground for Indian museums in the future—but I have to say a lot of my confidence comes from the fact that I’ve been given total autonomy here. The trust that the government and the corporate sponsors have had in me has been great. They see how hard I work, they see the results of it, and I think they see the huge response from the community.
For me, it’s not just about curating. It’s a much larger project about education and making art available to people who wouldn’t have the opportunity to see a Jitish Kallat or a Ranjini Shettar. They may not all understand it, but I think we have to engage people in creative ways and open them to different possibilities. That’s actually what a museum should do.
Jyoti Dhar is a contributing editor for ArtAsiaPacific and Harper’s Bazaar Art. She practices as an art critic and curator in Delhi.