Conflictorium Raipur
I have been the curator and project anchor at Conflictorium Raipur since its inception in early 2021. In this role, I have been responsible for conceptualizing, designing, and setting up the museum, as well as developing its intermittent temporary exhibits, events, and collaborations. The goal has been to create a dynamic and engaging space for learning and dialogue about conflict in the region.
It is a participatory museum that addresses the ideas, questions and structures of conflict. It is an initiative that brings together different sections of society to celebrate plurality and encourage confuct expression and avoidance in creative ways, by facilitating dialogue through art and culture practice.
Exhibitions
At the museum, there are permanent exhibit exploring the conflicts in the region, understandings of dispute, morality, antipathy, testimonies and the act of apology in conflict. The innumerable other structures and implications of conflict are recognised and investigated via temporary, but equally important and affective, exhibits that are held every few months as part of larger thematics
Inside there, Outside here
Minimal information and creating a sensory abstract environment, helps visitors to let go of their everyday concerns and focus on the present moment allowing visitors to prepare for their journey into the museum and the various conflicts that they may encounter there.
Boundaries and Borders
This installation maps the history of Chhattisgarh’s creation and provides context through different ways of seeing to understand where we are and why.
Circus of Violence
This is an exhibit by local artist community Quarter 417, it depicts the multiplicity of identities and the conflict enmeshed in them.
Moral Compass
We have displayed a copy of the Indian Constitution (a pre-1977 version) where visitors are encouraged to engage with it. A breather,a way to conceptualize the experience at museum so far and to hint at what's coming.
Gallery of Dispute
In this interactive installation, various viewpoints from within the existing social conflicts are juxtaposed conversationally that plays and puts one right at the center of these ongoing dialogue in the region .
Memory Lab
This community art installation offers visitors a safe space to anonymously express their innermost thoughts.
Witness Box
In this room, the visitor is transported aurally to the heart of conflict, where they are exposed to the real-life crisis situations that arise, blurring the line between victim and perpetrator.
Sorry Tree
The peepal tree at the museum is a Sorry Tree, a place where people can come to express apologies that were never asked for, expressed, or understood. The tree is a symbol of forgiveness and healing, and it provides a space for people to come to terms with their past and to move forward.
Temporary exhibitions
Imagining a forest
What does a forest mean to us today? Who do we see as occupying forests? What images do we see?
From our present positionalities, the question of access is primary the loss begins at an empty imagination. The forest is a distant reality that we may unfold only as an activation. Our insertions only produce mirages of the possibilities that lie within the forest that too framed by our present location, the spectrum between the grotesque and the magical both are abbreviated At this juncture, the defeating articulations of a forest are unimpressive the problems of representation are varied and rampant Who speaks the forest?
Plantations are not substitutes for forests, for the fireflies or its mineral nor its people, if so then does an urban inhabitation oscillate between quilt and consciousness or does it move beyond the exhibition?
The inherent contradictions between a dystopic abundance of the urban and utopic minimalism of the forest are beyond the binary. it is at the crux of where humanity ceases to imagine.
Imagining a Forest is an exhibition that attempts to locate our fragile urbanity foregrounded by the vastness of the forest’s elemental politics and its people and to explore the category of the forest and the politics that surround it from an urban perspective.
Ambedkar as feeling, emotion and instinct
"For me, Ambedkar is a poet of missing people, erased words, forgotten languages and cruel histories. I feel rage and nothing else when I read him. He tells me that without justice, no beauty in the world can be enough for humankind. My poems are bitter like Neem. Probably that is why you mistook my anger for lovelessness..."
'Ambedkar as Feeling, Emotion & Instinct' is an exhibition exploring and expressing B.R.Ambedkar as a figure of Love, Faith, Anger, Poetry amongst all the other roles and spaces he has made possible in the discourse of Freedom.
A collaborative work by Yogesh Maitreya and Shiva Nallaperumal.
Markers and Morality
Religion, throughout its frenzied history, has occupied a pedestal, one that makes reflection on it difficult. Despite legal recourse that decry freedom, how free are we around religion and it’s external and internal manifestation?
In polarising times, religious differences are underscored by tangible appearances. What one choses for their body is at once both personal and political.
Layered with unease through a lens obscured by extremism, what does personal relationship with the political religion entail? Is conflict the only outcome of religious existence?
Using discomfort as a stimulus, the exhibition is an inquiry into the freedom around religion and the social and personal context, especially around those that don’t have a scripture or even a universal language.
What does it mean to you/me?
Do objects define meaning? Can meanings exist in isolation? How much of identity is then defined through meaning derived from memory?
All of us are bound together through collective memories that make meaning. But when meaning comes from memory held through generations, does it affect identity?
Through this exhibition, we are trying to observe if meanings can change by the individual experience of time and emotions, sensorially. Our collaborators have worked on exploring the agency of identity existing beyond meaning or memory.
Art can help the extremely isolating process of giving voices to parts of identity not yet internally accepted. Amid the loud chaos of meaning making, maybe some meanings come instinctually. Through this exhibition we are also attempting to experience and examine these instincts.
Events
We host multiple regular art and culture events, Like poetry readings, performances, film screenings and interactive skill and thought based workshops that build engagement with our audiences and the community. We aim to design or host events that are diverse inform contant, language and politics so as to build conversations across different audiences.
