Berlin based artist-curator Rituparna Rana is designing a virtual exhibition “The South-Asian Migrant Identity: Narratives, Spaces and Constructs”, which is a collaborative space where contemporary researchers, scholars and artists from South-Asia are introducing their works using diverse modes of expression.
The virtual migration museum is an initiative of ‘Memory, Movement, Montage’, a research and creative collaborative of Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Minnesota.
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The collaborative came together with a cumulative concept by Assistant Professor Dr. Nida Sajid, Doctoral student Pawan Sharma, both from Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, UMN, along with Rituparna Rana, an experienced curator working within the arena of South-Asian Migration discourse. Rana is a doctoral candidate at the Freie Universität Berlin and a research scholar working with the Project Moves researching on South Asian migration. Previously, she was involved with The Partition Archive of 1947, California and worked extensively in collecting the India-Pakistan partition-based narratives in New Delhi. One of the primary goals of Memory Movement Montage is to create a mixed media repository of academic, artistic and other research materials in the form of a virtual exhibition/museum.
The virtual museum is conceptualised in association with Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz (State Library, Berlin). The State Library Berlin is a prestigious organization and has an immense amount of primary material and text resources, and they will also share their platform to showcase the Virtual Migration Museum. The opportunity to collaborate with Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (State Library Berlin) for designing and curating the museum will open up new avenues to associate with various organizations in Europe to include as a part of this museum. This is a long-term ongoing project, where the exhibits will be updated quarterly each year.
The purpose of this exhibition is to provide an overview of the academic, creative and artistic work that is being produced by South-Asians on different historical, political, social, cultural, economic discourses that affect South-Asian migrations throughout history and as well as contemporary times. Rana said it is a mixed-media virtual space containing textual as well as audio-visual media to exhibit the various pieces of work.
The initial structure of the virtual museum consists of an introduction to migration as a discourse and specifies the complexity within the South Asian migrant communities. It will consist of a virtual exhibition of still images and art installations. It will also include a story-map of oral histories of South Asian migrant artists. Rana also said she is currently working on creating a scholarly podcast of lecture-series by renowned academics working on the various dimensions of South-Asian migration, which will also be a part of the virtual museum.
Rana’s vision of exhibiting the work of various South-Asian artists and scholars in a coherent manner in a single platform is to revisit the histories of displacement and relocation, the struggles and the trauma involved within the processes of movement and the journey of cumulative healing and being in terms with the process of adaptation, assimilation, and reclaiming a sense of identity. The virtual museum is planned to be launched at the beginning of Spring 2023.
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