Paper short abstract:

The recently installed Gallery for Sikh Art at the MMFA challenges conventional museological approaches, offers new perspectives to Sikh art and art in general, by incorporating Sikhi (learning) as a curatorial praxis and prompting contemporary diasporic Sikh artists to weave new (hi)stories in.

Paper long abstract:

Conscious of its own colonial entrenchment, the MMFA re-orients its Asian collections in the Arts of One World galleries, offering new curatorial interpretations that address the social life of the objects and their various cultural entanglements. Thanks to a major gift from Dr. Narinder Kapany (1926-2022) and the Sikh Foundation International (Palo Alto, California), supported by the Baljit and Roshi Chadha Foundation (Montreal, Quebec), the museum inaugurated in 2022 a gallery devoted to Sikh historical visual and material culture. In this space, miniature portraits of the ten Gurus, military and ritual paraphernalia, textiles and archival material from the time of the Sikh Empire and the British Raj, as collected and filtered through the eyes of Dr. Kapany, have been placed in dialogue with contemporary artists of the Sikh diaspora. While this approach sheds light on one side on the personal collecting practice of Dr Kapany, it also allowed, on the other, artists to propose new modes of self-representation and envision alternatives genealogies while reflecting on how Sikh art has evolved in the past two hundred years. This synergy further highlighted how the inclusion of Sikh art at the MMFA challenged the Eurocentric aesthetic canon, as the content proposed in the space questions the normative paradigm of what “art” entails. This paper reflects on how conventional museological pedagogy was unlearnt by incorporating Sikhi (learning) as a meaningful curatorial praxis for the gallery, as it prompted contemporary diasporic artists to weave their stories in.