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CARBON | Science Gallery Bengaluru | 2023-2024My Role: Curation, Programming and Exhibition Design
About CARBON: CARBON was a hybrid exhibition-season open to the public from April 01, 2023 to May 15, 2024. CARBON explored our complex and contentious relationship with this ubiquitous element. From being the backbone of life and the hardest substance on earth, to the villain in the climate crisis — carbon has a multifaceted story. The exhibition hosted over 30 exhibits, along with a 6 month series of programmes including a food festival and a film festival. In the run up to the exhibition-season we also curated a Summer School on CARBON and a series of pop-up exhibitions in Metro Stations across the city. A critical ingredient to life and living—carbon has been at the centerstage of earth's history. The evolution of human society in particular is not just fuelled by carbon but also tracked and traced through radioactive carbon. Today carbon has been placed at the centre of a global crisis—one for which we do not seem to have an immediate solution. There is an urgent call to “decarbonise” by sinking and sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, which we have relentlessly pumped into it in the name of development. This kind of a public discourse, however, marginalises the vital role carbon plays in the relationships around practically all life and non-life forms in the environment. The exhibition aimed to reintroduce the iconic element to the public — most who only know it in the context of climate change — as a fundamental framework for life. Through interactive exhibits and art works we aimed to make the familiar unfamiliar, simultaneously raising questions on our exploitative relationship with the natural world. |
PSYCHE | Science Gallery Bengaluru | 2022My Role: Curation, Programming, Online Experience Design and International Touring
About PSYCHE: PSYCHE, was an online exhibition in its initial iteration which was open to the public from April 01, 2022 to May 15, 2022. It was also showcased physically at the Wellbeing Summit at Bilbao. PSYCHE was curated to explore the mind, brain and mental health through the lens of art and science. It hosted ten interactive exhibits, along with a comprehensive collection of lectures, events, workshops and masterclasses, tutorials, and film screenings and discussions. We improved the experience of the online exhibition to make it cleaner and more intuitive. We also integrated online mediation to make the virtual explorations more personalised. Highlight: During this exhibition we hosted a live experiment. We worked with experimental psychologist and an artist to run a live experiment with a newspaper on fake memories and news. The artist and psychologist wanted to study what factors led to the formation of fake memories in people. Thanks to participation of the newspaper, a large number of people could participate in the study. Visitors to the exhibition could also participate in the experiment and the data was collected by the researchers. The findings from the study were revealed at the end of the exhibition. |
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CONTAGION | Science Gallery Bengaluru | 2021My Role: Curation, Programming and Online Experience Design
About CONTAGION: CONTAGION, was a fully online exhibition which was open to the public from April 30, 2021 to December 31, 2021. It was designed as a public platform to explore transmission of diseases, behaviours and emotions. CONTAGION hosted sixteen interactive exhibits and connected lectures, tutorials, workshops and masterclasses, events, and films as a way to provide visitors multiple doors of entry into understanding contagion. Through the exhibition, we provided hope from the knowledge that there have been pandemics before and therefore, collectively, we were likely to have the resources to face the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, CONTAGION was selected as a Falling Walls Winner in the Science Engagement category. Highlight: As this was a completely online exhibition based on a large amount of research we created social rooms that would highlight all the resources from the exhibition. The social rooms hosted a variety of media — books, games and podcasts — that visitors could dive into. They were also cross referenced with different exhibits and programmes allowing visitor stories dive deeper into topics of interest. |
PHYTOPIA | Science Gallery Bengaluru | 2020My Role: Curation, Programming and Online Experience Design
About PHYTOPIA: PHYTOPIA was India’s first fully online exhibition, developed during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was open to the public from August 21, 2020 to August 30, 2020. PHYTOPIA supported the International Year of Plant Health initiative observed by the United Nations General Assembly. With our audiences isolated at home, this exhibition aimed to help people reconnect with nature — particularly plant life. The exhibition explored how plants are critical — apart from being the source of the air we breathe and the food we eat, they also animate our lives in different ways. PHYTOPIA hosted fourteen interdisciplinary exhibits, ten talks and events, two films, and five workshops — all to explore the hidden depths of plant life. Highlight: We for the first time developed the idea of a “Take it Further” section that would help our audiences continue their exploration of the ideas presented in the exhibition on their own at home. Key to this was a bilingual Activity Handbook — an Open Access compendium of experiments, activities and prompts for creative expression — that visitors could download and use. This was hugely successful and ended up being taken into both formal and informal classrooms. |
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SUBMERGE | Science Gallery Bengaluru | 2019-2020My Role: Curation and Programming
About SUBMERGE: SUBMERGE was the first large scale exhibition I developed at Science Gallery Bengaluru. It was open to public from December 15, 2019 to January 31, 2029. SUBMERGE participated in the Government of Karnataka 'Year of Water' initiative and featured the Smithsonian's popular exhibition 'H2O Today' facilitated by the US Consulate, Chennai. Given the water crisis in Karnataka, the theme of the exhibition was of keen public interest. What set this exhibition apart from a typical science exhibition, was how geologists, hydrologists, artists, civil engineers, ecologists, social scientists, oceanographers, historians, and storytellers, came together to tell a new story of water as a weird substance. With 15 exhibits and 45 programmes the season explored water as a socio-political-scientific object. Highlight: For this season, I developed a new format of programming that aimed to unpack the artists creative and research process through programming. We used the exhibit Terra Mars by Shi Wei Li as a starting point. The work used neural networks to study topographical data of the moon and the earth and create a “red” barren version of earth and a “green” lush version of the moon. To open up some of the questions posed by this work we organised three workshops - the first explored drone imagery and GIS mapping, the second workshop looked at data scrapping and neural network generation, while the third workshop brought together a speculative fiction writer and hydrologist to imagine what it would be like if the moon really had water! These sessions helped visitors understand the processes behind the making of the exhibit but also how the exhibit could lead to new questions and research ideas. |
ELEMENTS | Science Gallery Bengaluru | 2019My Role: Curation, Programming and Exhibition Design
About ELEMENTS: ELEMENTS was the first exhibition I curated for Science Gallery Bengaluru as my dissertation project during my MDes at National Institute of Design. It was open to the public from October 5, 2019 to October 11, 2019. ELEMENTS marked the International Year of the Periodic Table 2019, and was organised in partnership with the Royal Society for Chemistry and the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. The exhibition aimed to reintroduce the iconic periodic table to the public — most who last saw it in a chemistry textbook — as a fundamental framework for life. Through interactive exhibits and art works we aimed to make the familiar unfamiliar, simultaneously raising questions on our exploitative relationship with the elements present in the natural world. Along with the exhibition design, I also organised a series of public programmes for everyday of the exhibition, ranging from film screenings to a live musical performance. Highlight: I worked with Chef Elizabeth Yorke to develop a food experience called “Edible Elements”. We created a tasting menu based on different elements commonly found in food we eat. Visitors engaged in conversations with trained mediators and created their own elemental combinations of food. Connections were drawn between flavour and chemical compositions as well as questions were raised on how the processing of food affected its chemical composition. |
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