The Museum as Laboratory: Joyoti Roy on the Power of Museums

Recorded on 26 September 2021

“The museum is a great laboratory for cross-disciplinary research,” says Joyoti Roy, Head of Marketing and Strategy at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (formerly the Prince of Wales Museum and popularly known as the CSMVS) in Mumbai, as she talks about what makes museums unique. “(A museum object) has its material sciences, it has got its history, its aesthetic, its politics, and it has got its playfulness even… and this crisscrossing of different fields and different faculties happens only at the plane of the object…” For Roy, the museum is a site of practice, an institution that has at its core the powerful ability to innovatively uncover and interpret the stories that are embedded in objects—objects that span multiple geographies, ages and forms. This is why, she asserts, museums are, and have been, spaces of cultural relevance and must continue to be dynamic—reading the past to look towards the future. She describes the CSMVS, which is approaching its centenary, as the “museum of ideas,” a space that is always active, responding to the contemporary moment and thinking about what it can offer its diverse audiences.

In this episode, Roy discusses how her background in the sciences shaped her work in the arts, the origin of her love for museums and ongoing projects at the CSMVS.

^{(Featured Image: The Key Gallery under the Great Dome of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai. The building was designed by the Scottish architect George Wittet in the Indo-saracenic style. Image courtesy of Joyoti Roy.)}

The ASAP Cast series is supported by the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.