Khandakar Ohida

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Explorations will research the possibility of a digital/virtual museum based on a 50-year-old collection of objects that carry emotions and history, which were stored in an ancestral mud house demolished in 2022. Khandakar Ohida is the Coordinator for this project. 

Khandakar Ohida is a contemporary artist who divides her time between Hooghly and New Delhi. She did her BFA in Painting from Government College of Art & Craft, Kolkata in 2016, and MFA in Painting from Jamia Milia Islamia, New Delhi in 2018. Ohida has been a recipient of Shristi Art Award in 2020 and Young Artist Award given by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India in 2019. She has participated in Next-Step Artist Residency programme at 1Shanthiroad, Bangalore in 2019. Ohida showed her works in the Students’ Biennale organised by Kochi Biennale Foundation in Fort Kochi in 2016, and was selected to participate in the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art at Akademi der Kunste, Pariser Platz, in Berlin, in 2022, curated by Kader Attia. Given her experience, she is best placed to be the Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

This project titled Museum on the Moon, involves the research for making a virtual/ digital museum to be included in a feature-length film that will bear the same name. The Project Coordinator had been working on the film based on a collection of random objects aggregated by her uncle Khandakar Selim since 1973. These were stored in an ancestral mud house that was being imagined as a museum before it was demolished in 2022. This has motivated Ohida to reimagine it virtually/digitally which can be included in the film in the making. The ancestral house had been filled with antiquarian objects like old miniature paintings, prints, gramophones, porcelain vessels, old coins, old records, photographs, ceramic plates, multiple stamp books, and so on. These had emotional value. The museum was imagined as a space holding materials defying boundaries of country, religion, caste or race. The exploration is an attempt to understand the film itself as a museum as well. The digital/virtual reimagination of the demolished ancestral mud house will add a layer of utopian resuscitation to the film. 

The outcome of the project will be a digital/virtual museum in the making. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be an offline version of the digital/virtual museum along with 3D and VR files and audio/video recordings. 

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme in the manner in which it attempts to transform the loss of an ancestral home into a utopian vision of a virtual museum, by keeping alive the universal humanism that was reflected in the collection of objects painstakingly done over half a century. 

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is made possible with support from Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund.