How can culture exit the museum?

In my artistic-research-based PhD, I examine museums and archives as sites that have consolidated European history over the last five hundred years of European imperial expansion. By analysing certain museum objects and archival collections, I am attempting to understand how Imperial cartography and the creation of borders in the eastern frontier of contemporary India influence my body in terms of my material and visual aesthetics, language, gender, and sexual orientation.

Analysing Europe not as a geographic entity but as a psychological one, I examine the emotional and cognitive relationship of postcolonial bodies with Europe. I attempt to displace the museum’s attempt at historicizing cultures to uncover topological modalities of ‘becoming modern’ beyond modernity’s traditional geographical boundaries of Europe.

I approach my subject through the gaze of a modern tourist and employ multi-disciplinary research methods, borrowing from art history, visual culture, and anthropology. I work with mediums of video, performance, photography and exhibition-making as my artistic practice.