Apoorva Raghunathan Iyengar

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA will facilitate research towards challenging the traditional museum catalogue to design one or more decks of 52 cards - a kind of ‘pocket museum’ - created as a game that would be a tool for curatorial reimagination of the collection of the regional gallery at the Bihar Museum, Patna. This project is a collaboration with the Bihar Museum. Inaugurated in 2015, the Bihar Museum in Patna is a unique institution in the country that has attempted to reimagine museums in 21st century India with its focus on the people from the region. With its incredible collection of artefacts from the region, the museum aims to make history accessible to its community and the larger public. Apoorva Raghunathan Iyengar is the Project Coordinator for this project. 

Apoorva Raghunathan Iyengar is a conservation architect based out of Mumbai, Maharashtra. She has completed her MA in Conservation Studies of Historic Buildings from University of York, United Kingdom. She is currently working as an Assistant Professor at the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute For Architecture And Environmental Studies, Mumbai (KRVIA). She is part of various significant projects like UNESCO World Heritage listed Victorian Gothic and Art Deco and Ensembles of Mumbai. She also operates under Apoorva Iyengar Studio, where she is currently working on an archival research and catalogue of Traditional Board Games. Her academic interests involve built heritage and urban conservation, material and object conservation and practices, archaeology, visual arts, art history, art theory, museology, architectural theory, literature, drawing and other visual representation practices. Given her rich academic and professional experience and keen interest in the museum and visual representation, Apoorva is best suited to be the Project Coordinator for this Foundation Project of IFA.

Drawing directly from the entire collection of the regional gallery of the Bihar Museum, this project proposes a reimagination of two forms of recording - the library card catalogue and the museum catalogue book, in a way that it relooks at recording and collecting as an act of play. By studying the collection extensively under the guidance of the curator, the Project Coordinator will reinterpret the collection through a deck of cards - thought of as a game functioning both as an object of record as well as an interactive and playful tool of communication. Each card will have information on a specific object that could include details of name, place, creator, etc. as well as snippets of stories of the artisans and the craft-making processes. This format allows for a cross-referencing of all items across all the galleries within the Museum. For example, a Madhubani painting belonging to a certain period that is colour coded in green, can be juxtaposed against a wooden toy of the same period also colour coded in green. The Project Coordinator will create a reference map of the museum which will act as a guide for the audience to use these cards. The museum could also have interactive screens or QR code to aid the museum visitors to engage with the collections and design their own digital exhibitions. This way the cards will enable each person to curate their own intimate experience of the objects thus witnessing the museum through their individual perspectives. In order to take this experience beyond the physical premises Apoorva will also create a digital version of the game which can be played remotely. 

Keeping in mind the programmatic vision of public engagement the Project Coordinator will have targeted workshops beginning with in-house curators and guides to enable them to use and play with the card catalogue. Since Bihar Museum also focuses on engagement with children, Apoorva will devise workshops and treasure-hunt games for children where the cards become a set of cues for children to observe and discover the collections of the museum. Similar workshops will also be conducted from time to time for the general visitors.

Apoorva has divided the one year of project term into five phases starting with intermittent research and study trips to the museum for the first six months. These trips will help her to understand the audience profile and to draft designs of the cards accordingly before moving on to the next phase of designing and printing of the cards. In the large three months the Project Coordinator will work to develop the digital rendition of the card game and facilitate public workshops. 

The outcomes of the project will be one or more decks of 52 cards with possible interactive screens and QR codes to aid visitors to curate their own exhibitions digitally, the reference map, and a digital rendition of the game that can be played remotely. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA along with the final reports will be the set of physical cards, samples of visitor curated digital exhibitions, the reference map and digital version of the game, along with recordings of the workshops.  

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.