From Shrine to Plinth: The Dichotomies of the Worshipped and Collected Object

Speaker: Megha Rajguru

September 24, 2015 | 6.30 pm
Visitors’ Centre, CSMVS, Mumbai

This paper examines the role of artistic intervention in contemporary museums in the UK. It revisits and undertakes a critical review of an interactive exhibition designed and curated by Megha Rajguru From Shrine to Plinth, held at the Croydon Clocktower in Croydon, London in 2008. A series of artworks displayed in the museum space interrupted the museum’s institutional curatorial methods and explored the dichotomies of the worshipped and collected object.

This paper addresses the classification of religious artefacts as art and curatorial mechanisms in the museum that generate the secular act of close viewing and observation. It compares this with the temple ritual of viewing the deity. Emerging from two separate viewing traditions, the post-enlightenment inquisitive gaze in the former, and the transcendental viewing or darshan in the latter, this paper addresses the role of art in exploring intangible meanings of objects. It reflects upon visitors’ ritualistic behaviours in exhibition From Shrine to Plinth and argues that meanings of artefacts are revealed through human interactions with them. This is where the function of artistic intervention in the museum becomes most poignant, as it offers the opportunity to address untold stories and histories.

This paper makes a contribution to the study of curating objects of worship, which is an ongoing debate in museum studies, and offers alternative modes of curatorial thinking that are closely aligned to art practice.

Dr. Megha Rajguru is a Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. Her current research is a study of South Asian modernismin design and visual culture. She is also a practicing artist and has exhibited works in site-specific situations in New York and Brighton since 2012. She has been part of an art collective Remaking Picasso’s Guernica that recreated Guernica as a textile protest banner between 2012-2014. The banner was exhibited at Pallant House Gallery in the UK in the exhibition Conscience and Conflict: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War.