Suryakumar Omprakash Maurya

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA will facilitate autoethnographic archival research, a series of workshops and the creation of a travelling museum anchored on “conflict.” Through auto-ethnography, gathering of materials – personal notes, poems, photographs, conversation, spatial responses and dissonances – findings from the Conflictorium, and a series six of workshops aimed at co-creating artifacts for the travelling museum, this project will demonstrate an understanding of “conflict” as a movement which circulates between streets of Ahmedabad, exhibits of the museum and inner threshold of individuals, appearing differently at each moment. This project is in collaboration with Conflictorium, in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Conflictorium - Museum of Conflict, is a participatory museum centred on conversations of conflict—social, political, cultural, and personal. Established in 2013, the Conflictorium resides in the erstwhile Gool Lodge in Ahmedabad. With emphasis on art, audience and archives, where intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches to peace and conflict are explored, the museum tries to acknowledge the phenomenon of “conflict” as a key move in imagining a peaceful society. Suryakumar Omprakash Maurya is the Coordinator of this project. 

Suryakumar Omprakash Mehra is an educator, facilitator and media practitioner. He has worked at the intersection of arts and education with considerable experience in community engagement, qualitative research and capacity building. He has a M.A. in Media and Cultural Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai and a B.E. in Environmental Engineering from LD College of Engineering, Ahmedabad. He currently works as a Fellow for ELICIT Foundation, a non-profit organisation, established in July 2020, that designs education in response to the impacts of protracted conflict, armed violence and volatility on the emotional landscape of children, teachers and school systems. His work has been informed by an intersectional interest in caste, religion, gender, and conflict and seeks to create narratives that challenge and connect communities. Given his research interest, experience with media work and arts education, Suryakumar is best suited to be Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

The premise of the project stems from a personal and reflective inquiry. Within the project, walking along with Conflictorium, Surya attempts to trace the shifting images of the city through his personal archives, ruminations, encounters and the archive of Conflictorium to understand movement and transformation of belonging in the neighbourhood, and ways of locating oneself within the city. For Surya, this belonging and locating is political, where the individual becomes an active ethical participant in the conflicts that their location inscribes. This act translates itself into the creation of a travelling museum, that allows people in Ahmedabad to trace a similar route and make meaning of the vocabulary of conflict. As someone who lives in Ahmedabad, the Project Coordinator encounters the city as a site through which conflict is sensed. The riot-scarred lives and borders, caste-zoned neighbourhoods, industrial corridors and aspirational enclaves leave deep inscriptions in him. The museum exists as part of this city. And it further extends itself as the museum visitor walks in and encounters objects, texts and sound that sharply places the conflict in a relational manner with the city, the nation and the self.  

Enhancing these encounters is the central intention of creating a travelling museum. The project has been divided in three overlapping and interrelated phases: an autoethnographic research; research into the collection of the museum, leading to creation of an archive; the workshops to co-create artifacts for the travelling museum; and finally, the production and circulation of the travelling museum in the city. 

 The first phase pertains to a thematic search that responds to the archive through personal narrative. The second phase engages with the archive through these themes to produce provocations. The third phase creates the travelling museum through provocation-based workshops.  In the first phase, Surya will primarily concentrate on himself as the subject. He is keen to find six key themes that reflect the axis of transformation embedded in his journey from shame and belongingness to the city. Relying on memories related to Conflictorium and his neighbourhood, diary entries, poems, project ideas, conversations with family and photographs, he will register shifts in emotional landscape, moments of discomfort, misreadings and contradictions. These engagements will be recorded as stories and poems, some of which might flow into the next phase of engagement. Through the themes identified in the first phase, the Project Coordinator will explore provocations from the museum and its archive. Rather than a formal archive, this archive is a creation based on Surya’s interaction with the museum. The archive consists of the following: Material from the Temporary Exhibition - Concept Notes, Posters, Curatorial Notes, Graphics, Photographs; Photographs from different individuals for the exhibitions of interest; Voice notes from people on themes; Owed to Certain Emptiness podcast by Avni Sethi. Weaving the key themes from the first phase and the provocations found by unearthing the archival materials, the Project Coordinator will present them to the museum visitors, in the hope of expanding them further through their respective positionalities.

Findings from these two phases will lead to the creation of a travelling museum, a container to the journey that people can carry, question and engage with to reflect on their relationship with the city and sense of belonging. The artifacts for the portable and mobile museum will be designed via workshops with people from different parts of the city and co-facilitated by artists/researchers/educators. They will be invited to respond to the themes and provocations identified in previous phases and create artifacts for the travelling museum. The workshops are designed to create a reflective space for 10 to 12 participants who will be chosen and invited from the existing Conflictorium network, the neighbourhood, and the Janvikas Network spread across different parts of the city. Through the intervention of participants at the workshop, certain themes will be finalised for the portable container of the travelling museum. Each artist/researcher/educator will collaboratively design artifacts for each of the themes that respects and works with the positionalities of different participants. The artifacts can range from interactive comic design, photography, crafting, sewing to writing. Once the artifacts are in place, the travelling museum will be taken to various neighbourhoods in the city for testing before it is formally launched.  

 The Archives and Museums programme at IFA intends to activate museums and archive through scholarly and creative intervention with the intention to understand how they can emerge as sites of discourse and new narratives. This project, through personal archives and an interaction with the objects and collection at the museum generates an archive of provocations to find how conflict affects, is understood and negotiated with by the public. In doing so, the project not only contributes to the existing questions and values of Conflictorium but also extends them beyond its premises, making the city and its people custodians of the museum experience.

The outcome of this project will be three overlapping and interrelated phases leading to the creation of six workshops, co-created artifacts and responses that will make its way into the creation of a travelling museum.  The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA along with the final reports will be the proceedings from the workshops, the prototype of the travelling museum along with any outreach materials created for the dissemination of the travelling museum.

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 supported by Tata Trusts.