confluence of museum education and research came about at the Lahore Museum recently. Titled Daryaft, the event was organised by Aimon Fatima and Q Sonia Kashmiri, founders of The HeritEdge Collection, and Sana Durrani of Sana Durrani Studios, in collaboration with the Lahore Conservation Society, Lahore Museum and International Council of Museums. Prof Rashid Rana, dean of Mariam Dawood School of Visual Art and Design at Beaconhouse National University, was the guest of honour at the opening.

The programme took off with conferences probing the importance of museum research and education, the objectives and strategies for heritage conservation and future collaboration of institutes and organisations to preserve their collections. The event concluded with a guided tour of the display of research-based work in the backdrop of museum treasures showcasing the work of 12 artists.

In the context of this daylong exhibition, the museum was considered beyond its role of merely possessing collections and artifacts of the past but rather as the centre of education in contemporaneity. In pre-Partition India, researchers, scholars and anthropologists were commissioned by the British Empire to chronicle the culture and traditions of Hindustan and submit their collections in archival and artifact forms to display in the museums for the education of the British public of their colonies.

Museums are still considered a space for constructing and preserving knowledge whereas education has become an integral part of the institution by default. Lahore Museum, initially a colonial project, is known by its local name to the natives as Ajaib Ghar, or the House of Marvels. But where has these marvels come from or rather who has collected these? This question takes us back to the cabinet of curiosities in which the merchants and aristocrats from the 16^th Century Europe categorised their findings from the ‘exotic’ parts of the world and formed collections that served as precursors to museums.

A recurrent theme in the display was to theoretically transform the museum, without physically disturbing its original and natural state.

Our post-colonial identity is no less than a marvel as we aim to form a bridge to our old ways in an innovative way, in hopes of resuscitating lost practices and knowledge. In this showcase, the artists engaged in the sustainability and transformation of creative practices in the collective material memory of marginalised and indigenous communities of Pakistan. Yawar Durrani revived the Kunder basketry technique which has seen a significant decline due to deforestation and climate change. Ibrar Hassan and Farhan Umar weaved techniques to fabricate garments that have been lost to times even though cataloged by John Forbes Watson. The catalogue is an inventory of fabrics manufactured in South Asia. The commonalities among these projects were their focus on the practice rather than the object and meticulous blending within the resident garment collection of the museum.

This was a recurrent theme in the entire display — to theoretically transform the museum, without physically disturbing its original and natural state. The research projects aimed to camouflage themselves as the collection or part of the museum space in order to preserve traditional knowledge and transform intangible heritage into practice-based work to educate the younger generations. The technology-based work of Zain Shakeel reimagined the symbols of Buddhism by integrating contemporary techniques in modern technology to honour the profound Buddhist philosophy of fostering harmony among diverse religious communities. Aneel Waghela’s artwork was a dissection of various paintings and prints from colonial India, where he had collected and joined fragments from history to question factual and fictional data.

The cultural memory of this work embodied knowledge in the museum space as it transformed and reimagined itself as a site of practice rather than a collection of objects. Western museums have been practicing this approach by incorporating cross-cultural collections but this event marked unprecedented development in our local context as peels of our heritage and culture slowly reveal themselves dating back to the Jain era rather than the Mughal period when we enter the halls of the museum.

The artists proved to be connecting tissues between the existing collection of the museum in the background and their research-based projects which were put in the foreground. Art practitioners have always utilised the space of the museum not only in the making of artworks but also for dissemination of ideas.

In this repository of ideas, the artists and practitioners are engaged in such a manner that they cannot be separated from the museum in a theoretical sense as both layers of ancient and contemporary practices have converged and been reimagined.

Sousan Qadeer is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Lahore