Display of shortlisted proposals; installation view

In a pioneering initiative to engage the public imagination, the Museum partnered with ZegnArt, a project of Ermenegildo Zegna Group on a programme titled Public. Seven contemporary artists were invited to engage with the Museum and its immediate environs and create an artwork that reflected the nature of urban discourse and the tensions embedded in the idea of the ‘public’.

The exhibition sought to encourage dialogue about the nature of public space and explore the dialectics between art and the urban environment. The artist Reena Kallat was selected to conceptualise and create the public artwork for ZegnArt Public. Her work, Untitled (Cobwebs/Crossing) highlighted the relationship between public space and the city's history.

In Untitled (Cobweb/Crossings), an oversized web made with hundreds of replica rubber stamps wove a history of the city onto the façade of the Museum, with each stamp bearing a colonial street name that has been replaced by an indigenous one. By recovering the memory of one aspect of the process of decolonization - the renaming of anglicised British street names with Indian or regional ones - the work forms a palimpest on to which generations may re-inscribe stories. Each of the 7 shortlisted proposals were simultaneously displayed in the Museum’s Special Project Space.