The Memory Museum was a two-day pop-up museum of objects and images
The Department of History at Ashoka University actively nurtures engagement with the subject both within and beyond the classroom. The Memory Museum was the most recent endeavour in this direction.
Office of PR & Communications
17 February, 2018 | 3 min read
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What was it? The Memory Museum was a two-day pop-up museum of objects and images curated by the History Society team and contributed by members of the Ashokan community. It was a curation of personal histories, a space where one experienced stories of peers and professors and engaged with the idea of the relationship between memory and history. The classroom experience had familiarized one with concepts such as war memory, memory and narrative distance, and the linkages between history, memory and memorialization.
Have you ever thought of the love song that your parents consider symbolic of their successful marriage as worthy of being in a museum? Or what a Professor’s report card must look like? Or what probably was written in a eulogy for your great-grandfather? Or why someone would decide to collect matchboxes from every place he visited? Or why would anyone keep a cracked frame of a picture of a duck in a bathtub? Last year, a lot of these stories came alive through the museum.
What next? It is with the hope of keeping up this spirit of experiencing objects and images, that preparations are on for The Memory Museum 2.0: Whose history is it anyway? Contributions should comprise objects that have interesting stories or memories– photographs, postcards, letters, newspaper cuttings, maps, souvenirs from trips, dolls, mechanical alarm clocks, paintings or sketches, jewellery boxes, recipe books, walking sticks –everything!
