Osianama at the Kila >> More​
Osianama at the Kila
For over a decade Osianama has been the central motivation of Osian’s. All the activities of the group – the auction house, the archive & library, the publishing and design base, the film festival, the conservation laboratory, the art fund, the vast collection which gives life to an Osianama and the much awaited OLE and its education hub – are glued together by one’s clear understanding that India’s escape from poverty and inequality can only occur were she to reactivate her semi-dormant and buried five thousand year-old cultural heritage, and for it to seamlessly merge with the new contemporary aspirations of re-building.
With that in mind, the Museum intends to provide the great bridge between the finest university education and the daily flow of street experience by raising the bar for cultural tourism and artistic edutainment.
Osianama will bring momentum and renewed respect for studying cultural history and its unifying threads, recognizing the edutainment potential of museums. It will create new interweaving options for visual and textual knowledge in educational formats, facilitating the daily complementing of virtual and physical sensitivities for the art and cultural artifact. It will nurture the integrative nature of the creative mind and its inter-disciplinary outlook encouraging the need to be accountable on a daily basis to safeguard and enjoy one’s artistic heritage. It stands to highlight the belief in individual passion to transform collective cultural issues and help sustain the co-existence of Saraswati and Lakshmi without compromising the principles of the former to the whims of the latter.
With such a creative priority, even without governmental support, a new movement towards inculcating the arts and culture into all features of daily activity can ensue. From education curricula to the design of products, from the nature of the work ethic to the very values rooted in risk-taking, research and experimentation, all can be influenced afresh. Osianama will allow for the daily living of the ancient-medieval-modern-contemporary sensibility with a deeper respect, discriminating between the seamless unities and distinctions, between the fine and popular arts so as to better appreciate each. Energy will then be anew, there will begin to take place the paradigmatic shift required for irreversible transformation in society.
As the human mind passes through radical changes such as more porous levels of concentration and lower thresholds of boredom, as it dulls with increasing aesthetic insensitivity and ‘virtual’ excess whilst suffering the absence of philosophical romanticism, and as ever-thinning foundations for grasping knowledge, deeper economic uncertainties, ongoing ecological disrespect and greater intolerance challenge us collectively, it becomes imperative that the ‘museum’ experience be fundamentally transformed by becoming an act of joyous self-discovery.
