Untitled, Undated
An exhibition on the fragments of a science archive understood through
the processes of a scientist, an archivist, and an artist.
Launch: 22 February 2025
Duration: 1 year
Open to the public between 10 am to 5 pm on weekdays
Located at the Archives at NCBS, Bangalore
Please write to archives@ncbs.res.in to request a walkthrough.
Curatorial Note:
Record rooms are often imagined as a sterile site occupied by tall racks, endless folders, and heavy boxes. Each file that enters the room is made to appear like a piece of a puzzle. The abundance of objects, the careful arrangement, and the specificity with which they are kept, all reiterate a feeling of History edging towards a grand completion.
However, somewhere outside this guarded storage unit is a busier place. In this world that these records come from, there are often only fragments, pieces of stories left behind not yet with a seat in History. And dealing with them are people of all shades – the elderly and students, scholars and artists, activists and archivists, and us – guided by the drive to find meaning in these fragments and piece them together.
There are many names to this place: a lab, a studio, a kitchen, a desk, an almirah... They reveal likes, decisions, doubts, curiosities, biases, and all the things that make understanding our world so human and complicated. In this place beyond these glass doors are notes from an archivist, an artist, and a scientist as they pick apart and place together the pieces of their world.
Artists
Dhatri S Aradhya
Dhatri currently works as an archivist at the Archives at NCBS. Her work involves sorting and cataloguing papers sent to the archives. Besides archiving work, she works as a graphic designer. Some of her works include designing the in-house magazine The Silverfish and curating posters for various events.
Before joining the archives, Dhatri completed her Bachelors in Communication Studies, Psychology, and English at Mount Carmel College; and a Masters in Visual Communication at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology.
Sindhu Nagaraja
Sindhu currently works as an Archival Conservator at Archives at NCBS, Bengaluru. Her primary work involves setting up a lab and a protocol for conservation. She is also a conservation consultant to Archive of IIT Madras. Sindhu completed her Bachelors in Painting and Masters in Art history before joining INTACH, Bengaluru and training in conservation. Later she worked with INTACH-Bengaluru for more than 6 years. Major projects that I have been part of are Documentation on wall paintings and rock art site in Karnataka, conservation and documentation of polychrome wooden sculptures at Kalari Kovilakam in Kerala. She has also worked with Karnataka State Museum Collections, Venkatappa Art Gallery Collections, Oil painting collections from Vidhana Soudha- Bengaluru, Private Pichwai painting, Roerich painting collections and other private collections received at INTACH- Bengaluru. She specializes in the conservation of South-Indian traditional paintings and paper objects and has obtained training in Multi-spectral imaging. In 2022, Sindhu worked as a course anchor for a paper conservation training program held at MAP- Bengaluru, initiated by Tata Trust.
Kinjal Shah
Kinjal is an Indian artist born in 1999, who has been brought up in Bengaluru, Karnataka where she completed her Bachelors in visual arts from College of Fine Arts, Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath in 2022. She specialized in Ceramics along with subsidiary subjects such as screen printing, graphic printmaking, painting and sculpting. She majorly works with sculptural forms that uses hand-building techniques, textures and colors. She is currently working as a trainee in conservation at Archives at NCBS.
She was a part of group shows like - Elemental- panch bhuta, curated by Madur sen and Shampa Shah at Urmila Art gallery, Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Interwoven histories: Art traditions of the silk route, curated by Falguni Bhatt at Bikaner house, New delhi in 2024; Internship for 1 year with ceramic artist Falguni Bhatt at Aorang studio, Kolkata in 2023; she has exhibited her work in the show ‘We are the aliens we are looking for’ curated by tasneem Lohani in association with Art fervour and sizzle lyk dat studio in Bengaluru, 2022. She has been a part of “The Quiet Paper Clay Revolution“ workshop by Graham Hay at Aorang Studio, Kolkata, 2023. She also been selected for workshops by Kala-Sakshi Memorial Trust in 2022; Online International student exchange workshop by the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, Poland in 2021-22; Ceramic installations by Ramya E M in 2021-2022; Luster glaze workshop by Swapan Kumar Jana and Anju Paliwal in 2020. She has also participated in exhibitions of Karnataka Shilpakala Academy in 2021 and ‘tactile traces of tangent thought’ at Venkatappa Art Gallery, Bengaluru in 2021.
