I began my very first Instagram page in 2019, as an extension of a fellowship that involved developing outreach programs and public educational modules for a museum. I was always interested in old and beautiful things, whether buildings, books, or objects of any sort. Studying art history after training in printmaking opened up a world of interests, and most of them tied down to material culture of some sort. Over these five years, my page has filled with numerous depictions and descriptions of objects and artefacts – in museums, in homes, in temples and churches, in forests and heritage sites.
If you are attuned to looking for treasures and objects of aesthetic and artistic beauty then your radar will go off every time you’re in the vicinity of one. Have you felt that?
That you enter an old home or space and you know something is pulling you to a corner, to peep into a cupboard or ask permission to look behind a door. One can have a museum experience anywhere, they don’t have to be special structures with titles and labels – all around us we find heritage that tells us our own stories. The usual me is always investigating objects in other people’s houses, climbing on chairs to get a better look, touching, ogling, photographing… Perhaps someone will be offended by what I do, I tend to forget etiquette sometimes in the quest of documentation. Friends on the other hand understand where I come from; they accommodate my love of objects and even put me in the way of gathering interesting stories. What’s more interesting than a showcase or ‘puja room’ in an Indian home!
In a site of ancient ruins, I think of the artists who carved the rocks, their chisels chipping away at the hard surface, I am transported to another time and place.
I am also thoroughly fond of antique (or second hand as the case may be) shops. I lose count of the number of occasions I have spent time looking at lovely old rosewood or bronze items with absolutely no intention of buying, but under the guise of collecting details. Sometimes one gets to hear interesting stories of where certain pieces have come from, which owners, which homes they had been part of. And it is easy to put in imagination for the rest.
Objectspeak has become a kind of identity, a distinctive lens through which I view the world, interact with people and talk about my interests.