Sharing Collections in India

To generate a new model of co-curation and cooperation for displaying art of the ancient world.

• Ancient Sculptures: India Egypt Assyria Greece Rome (December 2, 2023–October 1, 2024), an exhibition at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSVMS) in Mumbai bringing to the Indian public for the first time artworks from the ancient Mediterranean loaned by the Berlin State Museums, the British Museum, and Getty, shown alongside objects from Indian institutions.
  
• Dozens of education programs accompany the exhibition, including immersive gallery walks, a multilingual audio guide, and Museum on Wheels mobile tours that bring the exhibition to other parts of the city, its suburbs, and rural areas.
  
• Online educational videos with experts from CSMVS partner museums about the loaned objects.
  
• A teacher training program to share the exhibition concepts with Indian educators for use in their classrooms.
  
• Ancient Worlds Gallery, a new exhibition space at CSMVS opening in 2025 will continue and expand the collections-sharing partnerships of the Ancient Sculptures exhibition featuring over 100 loaned objects alongside works from CSMVS's collection.

The Sharing Collections in India program is an exercise in global co-curation, with the agenda set by borrowing rather than lending institutions. This arrangement is intended as a foundational step in addressing the imbalance between the encyclopedic collections of the global north and the more local collections of the global south. The program also deliberately expands typical lending practices from short-term loans for special exhibitions to longer-term loans that allow for robust educational programs over several years.

Sharing Collections focuses on objects from the ancient world because very few museums, particularly in the global south, have the breadth in their own collections to tell the story of humanity’s global development from deep history to modern times. In addition, archaeological collections tend to reflect only the history and culture of the region where the museum is located. Displaying objects from across regions and seas can spark new debates and reveal fresh stories of the interaction, influence, and exchange that speak to the cultural interconnectedness of the ancient world.

Exhibitions

A precursor to Sharing Collections in India was the 2017–18 exhibition India and the World: A History in Nine Stories, a joint project between CSMVS and the British Museum. This exhibition, supported by Getty and shown in Mumbai and New Delhi, juxtaposed a wide variety of objects from the ancient world from the collections of both museums. Based on the success of this program, the partners expanded the collaboration to include the Berlin State Museums and the Getty Museum for the Ancient Sculptures exhibition. The final component of the program is the Ancient Worlds Gallery, an installation that will fill two floors of CSMVS and remain on view for several years. Focusing on material remains of the river cultures of Harappa (Indus civilization), Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China, the Ancient Worlds Gallery is slated to open in 2025.

Loans

Getty’s Department of Antiquities lent two Greek ceramic vessels depicting divinities and myths to the exhibition Ancient Sculptures: India Egypt Assyria Greece Rome. Curators from CSMVS and Getty worked collaboratively to select these objects and shape their interpretation.

Expertise

In addition to curatorial collaboration, the Getty Museum’s Exhibition and Design teams respectively offered mentorship through training modules and guidance on exhibition design. Some areas of focus included narrative building and object selection within a thematic framework.

Getty’s Department of Antiquities Conservation assisted with object installation for Ancient Sculptures to lend expertise on display and conservation.

2016: Getty awards initial grants supporting India and the World, a precursor to the Sharing Collections program that involved a joint exhibition of CSMVS and the British Museum
2021: First planning grant for the Sharing Collections program
2022: Additional implementation grants awarded by Getty to support the Ancient Sculptures exhibition and programming and the Ancient Worlds Gallery
2023: Ancient Sculptures exhibition opens in December
2025: Projected opening date for the Ancient Worlds Gallery

Sharing Collections in India is a partnership among the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSVMS), the Berlin State Museums, the British Museum, and Getty.