Museum in your Pocket! | Project Showcase@IFA with Apoorva Iyengar | April 30, 2025

How can a game create a playful and personal experience
for visitors looking at museum objects?

Museums and archives are repositories and authorities of memories. The library card, index, catalogue in a museum are a few of the most used forms that are still used to create a sense of order, to record and to register the layers of information associated with an object. Can an index card, an object label, be turned into a game for the museum?

Join us for our next showcase to listen to Moumita Ghosh from the Bihar Museum in Patna and Apoorva Iyengar talk about how a card game was conceived and created for the Regional Gallery of the Bihar Museum. The 52 card-deck game, with information about the object, creator, place, etc., enables the audience to understand museum objects, how they are curated in a gallery, and sparks curiosity to engage with history from multiple perspectives.

This showcase will bring to light how the project was conceived, how collections from the Bihar Museum were used to design such a curatorial and outreach tool for the visitors, of how the element of play and interaction paved its way to create new methods to see an object up close, and have a more personal experience that goes beyond just reading text labels and object descriptions. 

Museum in your Pocket!: 'Play'ful Curations at the Museum
April 30, 2025 | 06:30 PM IST onwards

Register on Zoom or join us on Facebook Live.

Apoorva Iyengar is a Conservation Architect with a Masters in Conservation Studies (Historic Buildings) from the University of York, UK. She is currently the Associate Director at the FORT Heritage Conservation Association. She has previously worked on the conservation of the Lalbaug Palace at Indore, the Afghan Church at Mumbai, and the heritage assessment and masterplan for Tibetan refugee settlements. 

Moumita Ghosh is the Deputy Director of the Bihar Museum, Patna, operating under the Art, Culture and Youth Department of the Government of Bihar. With over a decade of experience in collection management, curation, and various aspects of museum practice, she brings a deep commitment to the preservation and presentation of cultural heritage. She has held curatorial positions at the Indian Museum, Kolkata; the Allahabad Museum; and Lord Cultural Resources, where she contributed to a range of national and international projects.

This session is organised as part of Project Showcase@IFA, a series of presentations to showcase, discuss and engage audiences with the diverse projects we support and implement across programmes.

Apoorva Iyengar is the Project Coordinator of the Foundation Project implemented by India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) under the Archives and Museums programme, in collaboration with Bihar Museum, Patna.

Images courtesy: Apoorva Iyengar