A collector's tale from China to the world,.Budi Tek narrates

India-Art/China 

  

New Delhi Collecting is an art of perpetuation — a way to preserve and further history for the Generation Next without possibilities of manipulations by interpreters and chroniclers of the events of the past. Art collecting by individuals away from the institutional edicts is the best way to archive the processes of socio-cultural evolutions through the lens of visual imagery. 

The journey of Chinese-Indonesian collector Budi Tek is the story of contemporary Asia and China in context of the global cultural and economic movements that drive the fortunes of art markets and individual destinies around the planet. Budi, one of the most daring collectors of contemporary art in modern-day Asia has allowed his art and business fortunes to swing with the world markets to rise, fall and rise again. A poll in Art & Auction magazine in 2011 put him on the list of 10 most influential people in the art world, according to the New York Times.  

He is ready to open his new contemporary art museum in Shanghai — a private archive — in a restored aircraft hangar built by the Russians nearly 70 years ago. The door of Budi's new museum will open on May 17, 2014, in a symbol of the museum building boom in a changing China. The country, estimates Asian culture entrepreneur Philip Dodd (Made in China), is planning to build  nearly 8,000 museums in the next decade across private and public sectors. "I met Budi and his wife Michelle in mid January in Shanghai. They were pushing for the project — a series of exhibition rooms in a old aircraft hangar that will host Budi's personal art collections," Dodd recalled in a recent interface with a niche crowd of artists and writers at the India Art Fair 2014 (Jan 30-Feb 2, 2014).

Budi began to collect seriously in the mid-1980s when China went on an economic expansion binge - opening its door to globalised aesthetics in the process.

It was the time when contemporary Chinese art started making its  mark in international circuits - as institutional and private collectibles. Millionaire collectors in the west began to acquire works by new Chinese artists - many of whom were in hiding during Mao Zedong's cultural revolution and the iron curtain decades thereafter. In a reverse trend, local collectors like Budi expanded their "essentially Chinese collections by selectively collecting international art primarily to show contemporary Chinese art in the international context. The era witnessed the beginning of the homecoming of classical Chinese art that had moved out of the country during the British rule in buy-back campaign by museums and collectors. 

Budi cashed on this trend - and set up his first private museum in Jakarta. He is in the process of moving the museum back to Beijing at a more exclusive and private address - which will allow viewing by appointment.

The collector, who was in India for the India Art Fair 2014 in February, spoke at length about his collection.

"I am happy to be back in India after three years - I visited the India Art Fair three years ago and we were then talking about collectors and the kind of art works they collect — about my museum in Jakarta. My lifetime's goal has been to establish a serious and big museum. I have a Bodhi museum in Jakarta where we (along with wife Michelle) show serious art by serious artists and serious curators. The museum has become influential in Jakarta. But very soon, we will move the museum to a private headquarters in Beijing," Budi said in a prelude to recounting his odyssey.

"The Asian financial crisis (1997) wiped out all my wealth. My fortunes went down to 'negative 100' and I fought hard to recoup. Thank god, it is positive again after restructuring,: Budi recounted. Some people "love to live only for their wealth, but I am not one of them", the collector said.

He was "up there for three years during the financial crash cooking at home everyday just to forget what was happening to my life. It took seven years to restructure my life," Budi said. The collector is the president of a company "but he does not go to work - for the last 10 years which he chooses to describe as his years of self exile to pursue his heart's calling  art". When Budi decided to "build his art collection once again after the Asian market crash crash that sunk his fortunes, he began in a small way". "I started to get one piece, two pieces at a time. Now I am a full time collector- doing everything all at once. I am collecting  art and watching my two kids from Michelle grow up. For the first time, I felt I was becoming a father and grand-daddy at the same time. I had time to watch my kids grow up," Budi said.

The first work that Budi had acquired was of a "Boy Riding a Wooden Horse". "It is coincidence that (2014) is  the year of the horse- it is a good sign," Budi said.    

The collector's preferred genre of contemporary art is "installation". "Installations matter to me because they are three dimensional - sometime four or with more dimension. They are rooted. Each dimension has a message — about anthropology, sociology, philosophy and about anything and everything. There is something hidden, something unspoken and something unclear," Budi explained. One of the most profound yet "cutting -edge" installations in his collection that Budi likes to show off is a solid artwork,  "Bat Project IV"        by artist Huang Yong Ping that comment on war, ravages and abandonment. He bought the art work - rather persuaded New York gallerist Barbara Gladstone to sell the art work to him. 

It is a skeletal replica of an American spy plane with a bat logo on its tail that came down on the island of Hainan after a collision with a Chinese aircraft. After two decades of negotiations, the aircraft was acquired by the American government and cut into four parts. Artist Yong Ping used a Lockheed prototype of the cut version of the plane for his installation. "The artist thought of the bat logo and used it as motif (of stuffed taxidermic bats) in his work. When the installation was being shown at Guangzhou Triennale in 2002, the American embassy denied permission citing diplomatic reasons. It made the artist famous," Budi said.      

At the interface in India Art Fair 2014, Budi was the lord of the collectors' ring — flaunting his treasures with a slideshow.

Budi says his collection strategy is to rebuild "the history of contemporary Chinese art that begins in the early 1980s. He collects "historic Chinese paintings of value as well".       

His collection includes global stars like Ai Weiwei, Zhang Xiaogang and Fang Lijun - artists who broke away from the tradition of classicism and Communist realism to create a contemporary abstract language that is both a rebellion in his departure from aesthetic code and "universal" in sync with the cutting edge practises.  

Budi Tek's Yuz Museum in Shanghai

Budi Tek had been looking around for a creative archiving space for some years before he stumbled upon the derelict aircraft hangar on a trip to Shanghai with wife Michelle. "My wife is from Shanghai and we had the chance to look around Shanghai. We got this hangar built by the Russians 70 years ago. For 40 years, the hangar was empty. We hired the famous Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto and designed the hangar   into an exhibition space - minimal in layout - without compromising on the character and history of the space.       

Statistics cite that the museum has a total area of 9,000 square meters, 3,000 of which are devoted to the hangar space alone. The hangars’ ceilings 21 meters at their highest elevation point. As the buildings are protected, art works can be hung from newly built columns around a 10 meter periphery.

-Madhusree Chatterjee 

http://artsinfocus.webs.com/

       

       

Opening up to new discourse - needs more freedom of intellectual expression

Madhusree Chatterjee

New Delhi The muzzling of creative freedom of expression in interpreting mainstream religions like Hinduism, Christianity, Islam and Judaism have been subject to radical reactions from affiliate groups — claiming authority to a specific stream of thought about the polemics of the faith concerned and its bearing on the society.

Interpretations of Hinduism and the canons of Christianity through the Upanishad, Purana and the gospels respectively have courted controversies over the centuries because of the inclusive and the liberal nature of the faiths - unlike Islam which postulates with more rigidity in its interpretations (through the Hadiths) as a monolithic structure resting on a code of living, conduct and teachings of a "singular" god head— the prophet. Over the ages, Islam has taught its scholars and followers that while the Quran is the central pillar of the religion and the "sharia "- its code of existence, the Hadith (interpretations of the faith by Imam) meant to preach Islam to people were mere primers — guidebooks for better understanding of the religion. The interpretations have remained unchanged since the time of Mohammed largely because of the sacrosanct nature of the religion that does not tolerate "misinterpretations" or "communication glitches" .

The only time the teachings of Mohammed, the Prophet, were alleged to have been misunderstood have been on occasions of civilian strikes by the "jihadis", who have misused the "precept" of the holy war or 'jihad' to push "expansionist" and terror" vendetta together with communal issues. The "jihad" in Islam is open to debate in the collegiums of the faith with scholars divided over "deploying" the notion of "jihad" in insidious machinations across the globe by minions of radical groups.

What is the Quranic commandment on the subject of extremism, terrorism and suicide bombing?Interprets Shaykh-ul-Islam Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a Pakistan-based Islamic scholar and peace activist (founder of MInnaj -ul- Quran), "The killing of mankind irrespective of religion, race and colour - unless a court of law requires a proper legal punishment or in self-defence - taking up arms and killing people on their own are totally prohibited under the Quran." A translation of a Quranic verse says the "killing of a single man amounts to killing of a whole mankind".

HInduism on the other hand is a multi-pronged faith that has been subject to "academic" , "civilian" and "innovative" deliberations for millennia. The evolution of the faith leaves it open to "deviant thinking" about what is "approved" and what is "illicit" in a milieu of comparative analysis.

The religion passed down by transmission was documented thousands of years after the first tribe of Vedic seers outlined a basic animistic belief system to appease the nature for "rain, harvest, cattle, prosperity and long life of the people" — who made their homes along the banks of the Saraswati and Sindhu rivers in the wilderness of the north-western frontier of the country.

The faith was initially practised as a rite-based religion by rote. The simplistic invocation tenets applied to the act of daily "existence" as well — where all were treated on par and assigned with specific sets of duties to keep the early Vedic village settlements functional. It was an animated faith which grew as it passed down the generations of practitioners assimilating from the local and more ethnic spiritual traditions to become polemical and plural— and much later universal in its spirit of contemporary inclusion in a globalised world.

The edifice of the Hindu religion rests on the four Vedas — the Rig Veda, Sama Veda, Atharva Veda and Yajur Veda that brings to a structural mosaic the cycle of life. It includes include spirituality, daily rites of passage, economy, livelihoods, interpersonal relationships, communities and the cosmic order of life. The Vedas tramsmitted in Sanskrit - said to be complex language of the gods— were often unfathomable to the common man for whom it laid down ways to go about life. In an attempt to make the texts comprehensible for the commom man — at the bottom of the Vedic chain of transmission of wisdom — scholars of Hindu theology interpreted the essence of the faith and its "conceptual" ideology of salvation in the Upanishad, Puranas, Brahmanas and the Bhagawata- corollary scriptures that explained the faith with story-telling narratives and "sermons".

During the age of "bhakti" (or fervour in the later Vedicx age), the conceptual nature totems were given physical forms as pantheons of trinity and multiple god heads (running into thousands) — each endowed with mythical personas and vested with divine portends. The anecdotal feats were akin to Greek and Roman mythologies. The process of imbuing physicality to the cosmos and nature came to be known as the Vedic Hinduism — deriving its name from its cradle along the Sindhu river. The faith in its simplified version opened itself to more scholarly interpretations — and in the process more deviations, distortions, manipulations, subversions and radicalisation. It also simultaneously became a follower-friendly faith attracting large legions of disciples across spectra of life primarily because of its colourful ceremonial practises, room for diversity, beauty, aesthetics, the root piety and openness. The HIndu faith in India often serves as a escape zone from the daily struggle for survival.  

As the floodgates of "researches" into the pedagogy of Hinduism opened further, it became a tool for "vested interest groups" to espouse their narrow and populist agendas. A broad study of the interpretations of the Hindu faith at the beginning of the millennium shows signs of "repression" like an "entrenched caste system that addressed beyond the 'varnas' of profession (caste by trade), untouchability, denial of knowledge systems to certain groups, social heirarchy, expensive and elaborate system of rituals and gender discrimination.

Vedic scholar Manu in his scripture (Manusmriti) sounds almost fascist in his "reorganisation" of responsibilities for men and women — confining the later to the tending of the home and the hearth in a subservient social mantle. The segregation of the rights of the sexes is said to have brought on an entirely new "seamy underbelly" of darl rites rooted in lust, carnal appetite and greed. The deviant canons of Hindu tantricism - black invocation rites — meted out justification of the basal instincts of man by vetting dubious traditions like multiple partneting (many consorts), abuse of women, once revered as "Mahishis (scholars)" in the early Vedic age, limitations on the rights and freedom of women, wide use of intoxicants, violence, crime and deeper socio-economic inequities — that spill over even to this day in the nation of 1.2 billion people whose mainstream faith HIndusim continues serves the moral bulwark oif existence and polity in the 21st century. In India, HInduism has been has proved more engaged as a political "ism" than as a spiritual moorning for people to fall back as practitioners of living cultures.

American scholar of Orientalism and HIndu philosophy Wendy Doniger's book, "The HIndus: An Alternative History" which was removed and pulped by her publisher Penguin India last week after an Indian educationist filed a litigation accusing Doniger's book as vulgar" interpretation of faith, touch upon some flip sides of faith — and its implications for those who continue to languish at the bottom of the spiritual and cultural pyramid. It uses the present state of HInduism as a social pointer to disparities.

Doniger's crime is her "audacity of insights" but the scholar, who has authored several books on HInduism, does not fail to capture the spirit of discourse of the Hindu religion — that is traditional, conservative and modern like the same time like Christianity. "Right from the beginning, Hindu texts and practises tell of the simultaneous existence of polytheism and a broader belief in the ultimate oneness of the divine... To the question is HIndusim monotheistic or polytheistic, the best answer is yes. Not only have elements of both theologies been woven through HIndu texts for thousands of years, but different factions have argued passionately for one view against the other during the entire period — and the issue still raises Hindu hackles today," argues Doniger in her new book, "On HInduism".

Doniger says "the force of the passion of the contention" comes from the "political issues" that have often driven the question — particularly since the time of the British Raj and now again in the times of the Internet. If Doniger has managed to put her finger on the pulse of the intellectual argument over the nature and connotations of Hunduism in an age of Hindutva — and script it in ink on paper in a re-assertion of an old debate, then why do "hawks" of the faith bother to point their fingers at her assertions once again. Political insecurity and resistance to change, hazard groups of intellectuals.

The book is best "tackled" in a debate at a time, when "every ignited mind" in the country seizes upon opportunities to turn debates into greater public discourses.

Doniger analyses the root of the present controversy (over her previous book that surfaced in 2011) in her new book, "In our day, when fundamentalism raised its ugly head among the major monotheisms (Judaisim, Christianity and Islam), HInduism in India caught it too. The movement known as Hindutva while protesting that it is a reaction against European pressures, actually apes protestant evangelical strategies, including its fundamentalist agenda."

The reasons for the tirade against Doniger's book can be put to two streams of reasons — blatant sensationalism (for purposes of publicity) or political manipulations of intellectual discourses to subvert creative freedom in a democracy by a handful of politically polarised vested interest bent on espousing populist agendas for petty self gains. "The biggest challenge in a democracy is populism - which is self-destructive. Politicians use the flaws in themselves to appeal to the flaws in people," says theorist abd political commentator John Ralston Saul. It leads of widespread public anger and backlash —working to serve immediate political interest of particular groups.

Says publisher David Davidar, "Publishers are soft targets for radical elements to intimidate". Davidar, who heads the team at Aleph Book Company, has published Doniger's new book, "On Hindusim". The publishing houses admits an element of threat "but till such time, the company is actually targetted, the firm plans to wait it out". Curbs on literary freedom has been around for the last 25 years. "I was with the Penguin, when Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" was banned," Davidar recalls. Twenty-five years ago, in 1989, Salman Rushdie was "threatened" with a "fatwa" by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran for "blasphlemising" Islam in The Satanic Verses (the writer;s own interpretation of the faith). The hardliner demanded a ban on the book and clamoured for the writer's blood. Several death threats ensued and conflicts over Rushdie's "daring" work escalated over the years after the rejection of his apology by Iran. The reactions ranged from diplomatic rows to arson and bombings. The writer hounded into hibernation — managed to protect his "life and pen" in a triumph of free expression. The book banned in India in 1988 still remains blacklisted officially — though the curbs have eased after 25 years. The book is available on request to Indian readers from a handful of vendors — often surreptitiously.

The lingering bitterness over Rushdie's alleged critique of Islam continues to cast its shadow even today. Two years ago, the writer had to put off a visit to the Jaipur Literature Festival (in India) after Islamic hardline organisations protested his participation. Rushdie cancelled his visit citing threat to his life.

In an interview later to a national television channel, the writer said despite "a lot of personal disappointment, his overwhelming feeling is a disappointment on behalf of India, which is a country that he loved all his life and whose long-term commitment to secularism and liberty is something he had praised for much of his life life." "And now I find an India in which religious extremists can prevent free expression of ideas at a literary festival, in which the politicians are too, let's say, in bed with those groups to wish to oppose them for narrow electoral reasons, in which the police forces are unable to secure venues against demonstrators even when they know the demonstration is on its way," Rushdie said, lamenting the "decline in public standards, and in the liberty of ordinary Indian citizens to engage in discourse, to hear differing points of view".

Mumbai-based lyricist, script-writer, poet and social activist Javed Akhtar warns that a "trend to ban everything against a set opinion is becoming contagious in the country (in context of The Satanic Verses). Such strictures against creative freedom comes out of insecurity, suggests Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, whose novel, " Lajja (Shame)" about a HIndu family persecuted by Muslims was banned in Bangaldesh in the mid 1990s. She sought asylum in Kolkata and currently resides in New Delhi. Nasreen like Doniger and Rushdie — dared to blur the line between the sacred and profane with her "bold portrayal of women, spirit of feminism, gender roles and the significanc of faith and religious conflicts in a conservative Islamic society.

At a recent twitter post at the International Kolkata Book Fair, she exhorted book lovers to buy her book, "NIshiddho (Forbidden) before the West Bengal government banned it".

Scholars suggest that the insecurity over faith among "prosletysers and those moral hadrliners striving to hold together the conventional socio-religious mosaic together" stems from the reluctance to embrace change - and allow people to be amenable to plurality of arguments and viewpoints. New interpretations are often known to destroy myths.

Oxford scholar Mary Beard says "one of the points of the classics is is their capacity to make debate. "Culture can look very different from different perspectives. One of my favourite stories is that of Rabindranath Tagore who's supposed to have wept at the Parthenon in Athens - not because of its overwhelming beauty but because it seemed so barbarically ugly. That lies behind a lot of what I mean by confronting (the name of her new book)... I don't know about the Wendy Doniger case - but it is sad that an opportunity of a debate has been lost," she said in an interview. Views are galore — despite the official ban on the book and discourses around it.              

At a recent housewarming party in the new South Delhi residence of writer-poet Vikram Seth, Penguin's inability to protect Doniger's treatise on HIndusim dominated conversation. While a section of artists like Subodh Gupta and Sudarshan Shetty present at the venue cited zenophobia as the cause of the "suppression of creative and artistic intellect", a section of intelligentsia said "it had to do with political will and market dynamics". In a country of nearly 300 plus English users and nearly 40 percent literate population, publishers - especially multinational entities— do not want to take chances with business despite deep pockets.  

The notion of zenophobia in gagging of freedom of expression, faith and the resulting chaos in contemporary India can be traced back to the Ram Mandir-Babri Masjid debate between the "secular liberals" and the "right wing hardliners" in 1991 - when communal rage took its toll on a heritage relic whose identity was in doubt. Five years later in 1996, a magazine accused India's most visible contemporary artist M.F Husain of "offending religious sensibilities" by painting a Hindu deity in the nude. After a decade of legal presecution and right wing attacks, Husain exiled himself in Dubai in 2006 and died as a citizen of Doha in 2011.

"History is created by interpretations," says writer Reza Aslan, whose best-selling book, "The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth" was criticised widely by the western media for "distorting the legacy of Jesus Christ" as a myth perpetuated by his followers. Aslan remains unfazed. In the early era of Greco-Roman monarchies, bands of "self-made prophets" roamed the Judean countryside to rally for the freedom of the "kingdom of god"— Israel (present day) - from Roman rule, all of whom were put to death by the Roman authority. The band of executed "preachers" included John, the Baptist and a peasant from Galilee, Jesus. "The cult of Jesus was cannonised by his disciples, who composed the gospel in texts extolling the divinity of Jesus over the other revolutionaries of time," the book says.

In the middle ages, when the Catholic Church built around the cult of Christ and his ministry rose to take over Rome - from the ashes from the Roman  autocrats — heathen texts espousing pre-Christain paganism were destroyed. When Hitler captured power in Germany in 1933, the first act that his Nazi Party organised was "mass burning of books by Jewish authors including theology" —as its manifesto of purification. History, across the Orient and the Occident, abounds in descretions of creative and intellectual freedom of expression.

But with the new "enlightenment" brought by deeper inroads of literacy, free media and television in the last century, the discourse is opening up, says writer Pankaj Mishra. "Books, arts, religions and traumatic histories which were taken off popular intellectual spaces are being addressed openly (especially in context of China and Asia)," Mishra says.

"It is happening all over the world— fundamentalists are targetting people everywhere . We should we feel the persecution. Eye for an eye makes the world blind. The solution lies in discussion and collective resolve," says art writer, curator and culture activist Ina Puri. "We must not stand back and watch it happen - but do something instantly," Puri points out.

Nowhere has it more evident than in India — where one of the country's most powerful progressive arts movement in contemporary times began 25 years ago after a theatre activist Safdar Hashmi was gunned down in the Ghaziabad area in Uttar Pradesh on January 1, 1989. The Communist playwright, theatre actor, poet and theorist who was campaigning for a more "liberal cultural movement in India" - at the forefront of the street theatre activism — was killed while staging a play "Hulla Bol". Hashmi became a symbol of cultural resistance against authoritarianism — bequeathing a legacy — the Safdat Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) in 1989. Founded by likeminded writers and intellectuals, the organisation has been working to promote "liberal cultural consciousness with theatre, art, publications and related genres of cultures to address issues pertaining to the greater multi-cultural ethos in India today.

Art historian Geeta Kapur says, " SAHMAT has worked to build solidarity among the artists and intellectuals on questions of conscience in current politics especially in the areas of communalism. ... attempted more ambitiously to build a movement where an alert consciousness will anticipate fundamentalist tendencies in our national cultural life and provide a platform for those of us who should want to intervene in the social process…”

The war against the alleged "misinterpretation" of HInduism by Wendy Doniger might as well be a spur for a more inclusive debate on Hinduism — a faith that offers hearing room to all schools of thoughts, interpretations and discourses in the true tradition of the Shaivite HInduism that lays down destruction as the trigger for change — transformation

-Madhusree Chatterjee

 www.artsinfocus.webs.com

Museums have greater role to play, says International Council of Museums present Hans Martin Hinz

International-Art/Culture  

New Delhi Museums have a greater roles to play — beyond archiving of socio-cultural documenta and historical  objects de arts — in crisis-riven developing world, ravaged by violent social transformations, conflicts and new manifestos of change as mediators, liaions and catalysts of new cultural processes that desseminate disparities and differences without comprisning on the spirit of conflict to lend voice to the variety. 

"Twenty-five years ago, when the wall came down in Berlin, museums laid out the groundwork for cultural reunification of the Communist and the democratic Germany with exhibitions about the soicial, cultural and aesthetic lives of the people on either side through collaborative ventures — preparing people with knowledge of life beyond the walls," professror Hans Martin Hinz, preident of the International Council of Museums, said in New Delhi, in an informal interview on the sidelines of an lecture on "Global Trends in Museum". Hinz was trying to outline the greater role that museums — especially the International Council of Museums which benefits more than 20,000 museums worldwide with intervention projects — have been playing to create new cultural regimes that are more inclusive and peaceful.

"We had two different countries — one had Communist leadership with very limited access to the world. People could not leave the country easily to travel to the west. It fell on the museums on both side to tell the people what was happening on the other side of the country. The museums of erstwhile east and west Germany worked together to prepare exhibitions about the lives of their brothers and sisters beyond the walls. In the 1990s, huge mount of time, resources and work went into putting together such exhibitions that were discussed heavily in the media. Such musuem exhibitions played a key role in reunification process - forming a vital aspect of museum development in contemporary times. Collections were split and had to be reorganised," HInz said. 

Museums must "help with historical and cultural e4ducation" in such conflicting situations, HInz pointed out. "Many museums still have the conservative idea that primary objective of a national archive is to display historical artifacts. They fail to realise that museums have to serve societies— this is a role that museums have been developing the world over in the last decade to present themes that are important to people today than just presenting the past. The museums of today are striving to bring people together so that they learn from each other in the backdrop of the artifacts. They get to hear the voices of others — about two cinflicting parties, hostile religious groups. The aim is to allow the conflicting parties speak through the museum exhibitions - hear the voice of the other group and arbitrate who is right or wrong through discourses. Usually, exhibitions present on side of the story - address one particular group whifch they claim have the truth. When people walk through such exhibitions, they look at the truth from one perspective and they never start thinking about how to overcome such conflicting aituations," Hinz said. Museums should enable people to "interact in a spirit of mutual understanding - which is the first step in accepting the other position and percpetion in a conflict situation", the present of International Council of Museums 

HInz said in India, several museums have been "reaching out to potential visitors of tomorrow like in several other countries — to show original objects in classrooms so that teachers and students get "feeling of what is original object - which forms an important aspect of history". The outreach exercise has been described as "living museums"— taking museums out of the confines of institutional spaces to people. "Museums ofte invite teachers to educate them about certain exhibitions so that teachers can take the students to these exhibitions with better backgrounding and better prepareness about the cultural contexts," Hinz said.

The museologist said the "International Council of Museums",  which has two caregories of functions, internal and external, has broabased its activity to include cultural revival as well. "The internal function is primarily capacity building. We offer structures under which museum professionals can regularly meet each other to carry the movement forward. This dialogue is a hge step forward because most museums face the same issues and same problems in the process of development. Networking is therefore of importance in the internal functioning of ICOM," HInz said. 

The external aspect is "protection of cultural heritage". "Organsiations like the ICOMOS, Unesco and Blue Shield have been working together to protect cultural heritage- disaster relief tasks in towns and cities where cultural heritage is at risk. We then begin to think creative about how to help the country," Hinz pointed out, citing an example of an ICOM SoS intervention in Cairo. 

An ICOM dossier said "an emergency mission led by a delegation from ICOM, Unesco and Blue Shields flew to Cario on January 30, 2014  for a three day mission to draw up a contingeny plan to restore damaged artifacts at the Islamic Musuem and the National Library of Egypt at Bab el-Khalq place, destroyed in a car bomb attack a week earlier".    

The mission met Mohammed Ibrahim, Minister of State for Antiquities of Egypt, as well as the directors, curators and conservators of both the institutions. They carried out an in-depth assessment of the damage to the building and the collections.The building at Bab al-Khalq Place was erected from 1889–1903 to house the Museum of Arab Antiquities –later known as the Museum of Islamic Art (since 1952) and the Islamic Museum (since 2007) – and the National Library of Egypt.

The blast at 6.02am on January 24 destroyed parts of the building including electricity installations, fire and water networks and air condition systems. While “the architectural substance of the building was safe”, according to architect Riccardo Giordano, who participated in the mission, there was huge damage to the collections held by both the National Library of Egypt and the Islamic Museum. The conservators of both institutions acted immediately and saved many of the exhibited objects from further damage and destruction.Regine Schulz, member of ICOM’s Executive Council and Director/CEO of the Roemer- and Pelizaeus-Museum in Hildesheim (Germany), made together with Christian Manhart (UNESCO), the architect Riccardo Giordano and Shadia Mahmoud (Ministry of Antiquities, Egypt) a first round of assessment of the damage and collective study with the teams of the two institutions. 

The whole museography of the Museum of the National Library and of the Islamic Museum was destroyed, though bulk of the manuscripts and scrolls was protected by the bullet-proof showcases. Some 326 objects were exhibited in the Museum of the National Library including seven rare manuscripts and three papyri which suffered water damage, two in cases severe. “The situation in the Islamic Museum was even worse.”, Schulz said, “Because several of the large wood, bronze and glass objects were displayed without glass protection, the damage and destruction are very serious”. In January 2014 a total of 1,471 objects were on display. Of these, 164 were completely destroyed, badly damaged or missing until now, including 61 ceramics (vessels and tiles), 54 glass objects, 20 metal works, 18 wood works, five stone objects, five pieces of jewellery and one golden coin. Additional damage was mainly caused by running water unleashed by the fire fighting system which could not be stopped immediately and by the scattered glass resulting from broken windows and showcases. All damaged objects must be cleaned very carefully, and glass fragments and other remains from the blast removed.

UNESCO had set aside emergency funds of 100,000 US Dollars on the same day the blast took place stating that “measures for the rehabilitation of these two institutions and their collections will shortly be submitted by UNESCO to potential donors in Egypt and abroad.” The assessment mission report helped raise funds to repair the damages in the two Egyptian institutions.

Since the 2011 uprising, ICOM has been following the events in Egypt closely. In 2011, ICOM published an Emergency Red List of Egyptian Cultural Objects at Risk as a tool to disseminate information and raise public awareness of the fight against illicit trafficking of cultural objects. ICOM’s Disaster Relief Task Force also reported on the burnt down Institut d’Egypte in December 2011 (source ICOM report) .

"The project is still underway," Hinz said. The International Council of Museums has prepared a red list as well to retreive "pilfered" artifacts in Syria, Afghanistan, Mali, Egypt and Iraq. "The red lists have been sent out cultural stakeholders, including art dealers, in the respective countries to inform the ICOM about the appearance of the objects on the list for sale in the markets. We have been able to return thousands of such objects to the museums," Hinz said.

Commenting on the broad global trends in museum movement, Hinz said, "the national musuems in countries like Japan, Africa, Germany, Latin America and the Balkan region have spearheading movements to address culturally sensitive issues like Holocaust, wars, Nazism, Facism, ethnic conflicts, racism  and miilitary repression - earlier banned in public places because of the trauma associated with them". In South Africa, museums like in Germany had played a "mediating role" in the anti-aprtheid and reconciliation process- healing social wounds with theme-based exposition while in South America- memorial museums became commemorative archives for martyrs of military dictatorships. 

Museum as a concept was born in Italy, HInz said. "In the 15th century Europe, townhouses and palaces of rich merchants became the important collection houses. The owners often invited artists to present the arts and artifacts collected by the family in a way that prsentations made history. The other important centres of collections were the armouries and arsenals of Europe. In the late 18th and 19th century, many of these collection houses opened to people. The 20th centiry saw the several smaller neigbourhhod museums for the local people to tell and archive their stories. The former colonial archives, which later became national museums in the post-colonial era, are the repoirtories and devices of change — donning many hats to prepare for new social orders in the era of globalisation by documenting history as it has been," Hinz said. The role of the museum is now more complex and nuanced than before.

-Madhusree Chatterjee     
http://artsinfocus.webs.com/      .                  

India, Chicago Art Institute create common e-database for museum collectibles in India

India-Art/Culture 

New Delhi: Museums as repositories of history, art and living heritages in India have been in the midst of a discourse for the last decade since the custodians of the country's culture corridors realised the importance to make "cultural institutions owned by the government more relevant to the audience of tomorrow as catalysts of cultural advancements". 

In its enadeavour to enrich museums in the country and make them more experiential, the Indian government has brought on board several foreign institutions to lend their expertise in making museums across the country  "activity oriented" to cater to people and living cultures.

Last year, the culture ministry of the country entered into an agreement ith the Chicago Art Institute for a "Museum Excellence" programme on 150th year of the birth of seer Vivekananda as a memorial project. 

The seer, a Vedic scholar, took United States of America by storm in 1893 when he lectured in Chicago about syncretic spirituality at the World Parliament of Religions in the city's downtown area in South MIchigan Avenue in a building that is now home to the institute. 

The Congress was "electrified" by the seer's legendary address, who made a plea to end zealotry and bigotry.         

As part of the memorial agreement, it was decided that the Art Institute of Chicago will share the best practises with Indian museums through a series of seminars, workshops and exchange studies. Every year, a select group of professionals from India will be sent to the Art Institure for training and — experts from Chicago will travel to India to assist in care and conservation-related education projects.

Officials of the Chicago Art Institute and the ministry of culture, who met this month in New Delhi to assess the programme in its second year said it was showing remarkable progress. The programme applies to spheres of care, preservation, cataloguing and display of the rich cultural heritage of India,

Carrying the initial exchanges of in "Museum Best Practises" and "Collective Management and Preventive Conservation" a step forward — the ministry of Indian culture and Chicago art institute announced the creation of a new database — to collate and digitise museum archives. The website, "Jatan", a common database for all museums, will bring the collections of all museums under one portal and involve more museums. 

"The database will be a great boon to art history scholars, students of art appreciation and interested people to study the collections of museums," Douglas Druick, president of the Chicago Art Institute, said. The database will have many applications. "It will be a great management tool like taking inventory of the records that are on pen and paper and making them available as computer images," Druick said. 

A spokesperson for the Indian ministry of culture said, "With the art institute's assistance, all the museums directly funded by the Indian national government, including the National Museum in New Delhi, the Indian Museum in Kolkata, the Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad, the Victoria Memorial Museum in Kolkata, the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, all the 44 site museums managed by the Archaeological Survey of India have agreed to use a single database and taxonomic system to catalogue their collections. India is the country to have adopted the system.       

Comparing the museums of India and United States in the context of integrations of archives into a common pool, Druick said "in US, all museums were independent. "We manage our own colloections unlike in India, where museums are governed by a central agency. Here one can manage 10 museums with one system," Druick said.

In the first phase of the digitisation of museum archives, nine museums have begun using "Jatan" digital management software developed by the Centre for the Development of Advanced Computing. The partnership, which has been described as the first of its kind between India and an American institution, has been set up with a grant by the Indian government to the Chicago Art Institute.

The institute is looking at India to "expand the purview and depth of its Indian collection" and add more contemporary art to its repertoire, Douglas Druick said. The Indian archive - gallery — occupies centrestage of the museum and "no visitor to the museum can miss Indian collection," the president of the institute pointed out. The institute — known as one of the most premier of American art archives and school of art — has been working with Indian contemporary artists like JItish Kallat (who created a digital art project Public Notice 3),  Zarina Hashmi (with a project Paper like Skin) and Amar Kanwar (The Lightning Testimonies) — to open a dialogue between American art lovers and Indian contemporary art on historical and aeathetic perspectives to show the "universality" of Indian practises and "rich indigenous content from the country's history". It hosted a exhibition of Rabindranath Tagore's "The Last Harvest" — to mark the poet-artist's 150th birth anniversary in 2012. 

"We are preparing to host a solo exhibitions of NIlima Sheikh and Dayanita Singh, two leading woman contemporary artists," Druick said.   

Glimpses from an conversation with Douglas Druick 

The objective of the museum excellence programme between India and Chicago Art Institute is to make musuems more "relevant places for the audience of tomorrow" as living places of art, heritage and cultural movements, Douglas Druick, the president of the Chicago Art Institute told this writer in an informal chat in New Delhi. He was in India to lecture on "The Chicago Art Institute and Museum Best Practises" in January end. He coincided his visit to tour the India Art Fair 2014 as well — hunting for "potehtial works of art".    

"We have nearly 300,000 works of art - and our primary responsbilities are to care for the art works and present them to the public in a manner that addresses the contemporary sensitivies of the younger audience," Druick said, adding that the art institute was "very encyclopaedic in nature"- oriented in raising awareness about museums among masses.

Druick said "as anywhere else, the notions of conservation have seen growing interest for sometime and several museums have enetered into collaborative museum excellence programmes to share know-how about best practises and preventive conservation across the world".       

Commenting on a new partnership between Indian museums and the Chicago Art Intitute, Druick said the need at the moment was to "create priorities" and "a plan for management of resources — including additional human resources". 

Druick said museums in the US were using the social media networks to build "recognition" about collections and "emails" to atract new audiences. "Marketing museums through the social networks is important for large shows and mass viewings— for instance to get the 15-year-olds to the museum," Druick said.   

Everyone is attracting audience of tomorrow, Druick said. "We need to remain relevant. You have to give something that people want — find out the kind of works that people want to see," he said. The Chicago Art Institute has initiated a teenage feedback programme under which "teenage teams are reaching out to peer groups across Chicago with competitions on what youngsters would "like the museum to remain relevant". "A dialogue is on," Druick said.             

The programme in India is "essentially is discussion (and exchange) on how to get people to the museum". Indian musuems have more historical material than art unlike museums in the west. "The challenge here is whether it is to put contemporary art  in spaces which have ancient art— to create present out of the past and present out of the present,' Druick pointed out.       

-Staff Writer 

http://artsinfocus.webs.com/