What do the ordinary, everyday objects we collect and accumulate during our lifetime tell about us?
Khandakar Selim, a retired doctor's assistant from Kelebala — a remote village in West Bengal — has been collecting ordinary, everyday objects like postage stamps, clocks, ceramics, and bottles of perfume since 1973, accumulating over 12,000 objects over the past 50 years. Some of these objects were given to him by the people he met during his work visits to their homes as a sign of their gratitude; others, he acquired from second-hand markets and curio shops.
Once housed in Selim's now-demolished ancestral mud house in Kelebala, these objects form the beating heart of his niece Khandakar Ohida's film 'Dream Your Museum' (2022) — the winner of Victoria and Albert Museum's triennial Jameel Prize for contemporary art and design inspired by Islamic traditions.
An intimate, personal, and nuanced portrait of her uncle told through the commonplace objects he collected during his life, Ohida's film delves into the conditions of capital, class privilege, and the colonial frameworks that exclude certain bodies from participating in 'official' institutional archives.
Far removed from the somewhat nationalistic impulses that sometimes shape India's institutional archives and official histories today, Selim's quotidian museum exists within ubiquitous metal trunks found in most middle-class South Asian households. And through these moving and movable archives, Ohida's short film examines the tension between postcolonial ideas and narratives of preservation and the micro-universe of Muslim existence in contemporary India.
Ohida’s film — and the accompanying installation of Selim's collection — does more than simply question the boundaries of art and film; it invokes a re-imagining of memory itself, layered within the long shadow of colonialism and personal history. Shaped by a deep awareness of the State's quiet, powerful presence in the ordinary lives of minorities in rural India, Ohida crafts her narrative around an intimate, internal conflict — the distance between official institutionally permitted preservation and intimate, personal, and private lived memory.
Through Ohida’s lens, we are drawn into the textures of the Indian Muslim experience, where personal relics speak louder than neatly framed histories. What emerges is less a critique than an offering — an alternative museum that invites us to dream as much as remember, and to imagine beyond the constraints of both the colonial and official gaze.
Dream Your Museum is on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum, alongside works by the awards’ six other finalists, at V&A South Kensington from 30 November 2024 to 16 March 2025. Learn more about the exhibition here.
Dream Your Museum and a selection of objects from Khandakar Selim's collection will also be on view at GABAA, Santiniketan, as part of the inaugural edition of the Bengal Biennale.
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