Mumbai-based artist, Harshit Agrawal, explored during his residency with Google Arts & Culture Lab how emerging technologies can help showcase the unique beauty, stories, visual language and history of Indian cultural artifacts.

Matchbox artworks have a rich and vibrant history in India, capturing changes and stories of Indian society. Indian collectors preserved this unique heritage as a hobby finding thrill and intrigue in hunting for these rare items.

Harshit created this playful interactive experiment to celebrate Indian nostalgia and Gautam Hemmady’s matchbox art collection - the largest collection in India. This residency was in collaboration with Museum of Art & Photography, who Gautam donated his collection to and Tasveer Ghar, the South Asian archivists, who provided the digital archive of Gautam’s collection for the purpose of this experiment.

Matchbox Momentos let you discover and collect up to 342 rare snapshots of India’s cultural history across 19 themed journeys. Each board has 19 matchbox artworks to collect including a special edition collectible created by the artist Harshit Agrawal, inspired by Gautam Hemmady’s original matchboxes and generated with the help of Google AI.