About the Actant
© Avani Tanya
Avani trained as an interdisciplinary artist with a specialisation in book making and photography. Images, found objects, sculpture and oral history play a significant role as material in her artistic work and design practice. She is interested in stories that collections tell, and through that, in urban life and the nature of memory. In 2017 she was an artist in residence at the Delfina Foundation and the V&A Museum in London where she created a collaborative book that interprets objects from the museum's collections from South Asia.
© Avani Tanya
For the duration of this project, I propose to spend time wandering through the Indian Museum — while systematically documenting all my interactions with objects on display, the display systems, visitors, museum staff — and the incidents that play out during these encounters. I would also like to use this opportunity to invite people from the city; friends, peers, strangers to have a chat and explore the museum together with me. Afterwards, I would like to set up an editorial desk on the Goethe-Institut Kolkata premises and put together a maquette for a publication of the gathered material of a fabricate d ‘museum in my mind’, which could include but not be limited to photographs, texts and other forms of recordings — opening up the ‘editorial desk’ as a place for collaborative construction of ideas. The resulting publication would be a personal, selective, collaborative, multilingual reading of the museum.