Creation of Cultural Spaces, Cultural Preservation and Infrastructure

If we look at the density of art museums in Germany, we recognize a contrast, even a unique feature compared with many parts of the world: nowhere will you find as many public museums dedicated to modern art as in Germany. Several countries do not have even one.

In India’s historical museums, such as the Indian Museum founded in 1814 in Kolkata, there are only minor indications of more modern art, many of which already end at 1800. Besides a few private exhibition halls and galleries, such as the DEVI Art Foundation in New Delhi and the CIMA Gallery in Kolkata, the only governmental institutions are the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) opened in New Delhi in 1954 with branches in Mumbai and Bangalore.

After both the Indian economy and Indian contemporary art have experienced major upswings in recent years, the first large museum of modern art is being planned now in Kolkata. Kolkata, the former capital city of India and once considered the “Paris” of intellectual India, went into a constant downward spiral beginning in 1911, and is now the capital of West Bengal and increasingly has been perceived – in part through coverage of the work of Mother Theresa – as India’s worst poorhouse. It was here that a private initiative began in 2008, which now aims to ignite a renaissance of the arts and also open the very first modern art museum on the Indian subcontinent. The KMoMA, a Museum of Modern Art with the prefix K for Kolkata, has a decidedly international ambition to give the Western/North American idea of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA = New York City) an Indian/Eastern identity.

At first glance, this project looks like a perfectly thought-out adaptation of the “Bilbao effect,” for the KMoMA is being designed by the architects of the Tate Modern in London and the Schaulager in Basel, the internationally popular Swiss office of Herzog & de Meuron. However, a closer look reveals that much effort is taken to give the project an identity-heightening and –lending effect. The aim is the creation of a forceful combination of world and street credibility. The project presents itself to both the global and the local publics; it reflects both the need for an internationally active collection and exhibition hall for the fine arts and for one with a local, urban, regional and national perspective. In the best case, KMoMA may generate an entirely new viewpoint, a new perception of all of art history; no longer filtered through European or American eyes, but through Indian eyes, which now see both their own art history in India, hardly perceived by the rest of the world, and the similarly unfamiliar histories and influences of their Asian next-door neighbours. The interdisciplinarity of the KMoMA is also expedient; it will be not only an art centre but also a cultural city, integrating in its concept the important Indian fields of music, dance and theatre – both contemporary/avant-garde and traditional/regionalist forms.

In March 2009, the Goethe-Institut India became active in supporting institutional planning of the KMoMA. First, the German museum directors Susanne Gaensheimer of the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, and Susanne Titz, Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach, were invited to Kolkata to present the issues of present museum work in Germany at the international symposium Museums of the Future, which was organized for the presentation of the first draft of KMoMA. Special attention was given the concept of the once first “postmodern” museum, which introduced the 1980s’ international boom in museums: Museum Abteiberg. It was the first building designed by Hans Hollein, developed in the early 1970s in close cooperation with the Mönchengladbach museum director Johannes Cladders. It is currently en vogue due to the consistency of its scheme both with regard to space and content, and became the ideal model for further discussion.

At the request of the Herzog & de Meuron architectural office, the present director Susanne Titz – who recently oversaw comprehensive general renovations and brought the attention of the public eye back to this building – was hired as the museum consultant for the KMoMA, who will now accompany both the spatial and programmatic fixation of the KMoMA for the Goethe-Institut. The Goethe-Institut positioned the venture as an experimental project in the “Culture and Development” division, because it is also an open-ended investigation of the future perspective of museums, their connections to the regional, urban or even national identities of their clients and the possibilities of new kinds of relationships between a cultural institution and society, between the most divergent spheres of anticipation, between museum and city.

Interview: Rakhi Sarkar, initiator and head trustees of KMoMA, in conversation with Susanne Titz