Plotting away

Panels from the ongoing exhibition, Spectral Times

Say you are walking through a museum. There are all these artifacts around you standing as still as lampposts. How do you bring them to life? Simple. You let your imagination fly. You ascribe stories to the inanimate objects, giving them a new, fictional life. And in the process, you can even create a narrative with a plotline that involves romance, mystery, the supernatural and the like.

That's what participants at an upcoming workshop at Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum will be encouraged to do. They will be taken on a tour of the latest exhibition on display there, called Spectral Times. It's an audio-visual experience that graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee has put together after penning stories that allude directly to or are inspired by the museum. The narrator is a make-believe reporter called Birjis Bari, who writes articles in a post-truth world. "The uncanny stories reveal the extraordinary lives of everyday people. And in creating urban legends that are at a slight tangent to reality, Sarnath encourages us to reflect upon our lives and those of others with his tongue firmly in cheek," says Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, honorary director and managing trustee of BDL.

Taking a tangential approach to reality is exactly what the workshop's participants, too, will do on their tour of the exhibition. They will be asked to stop at different points and put their thinking cap on. How do you re-imagine a statue as a character who, for example, is actually a benevolent Norse God infiltrating the global elite to cut them down to size? Not just that, people will also be encouraged to illustrate their stories. So, sign up if everyday reality has become bit of a yawn for you, and like we said, let your imagination fly.

On: March 2, 11 am to 2 pm
At: Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, 91 A, Rani Baug, Byculla East.
Call: 23731234

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