Mandara Vishwanath

Biography

Mandara leads the Collections team at MAP, overseeing and strategizing for a collection of over 150,000 artworks across popular art, photography, textiles, sculptures, modern and contemporary art and living traditions. With an educational background in English literature and Performance Studies, Mandara’s focus is on developing new research, taxonomies and metadata creation to enable in-depth archival and curatorial work.

Mandara is the key person responsible for incoming and outgoing loans, Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) registration of antiquities, executing authenticity certificates, licensing images from the collection, signing off on insurance for the entire collection and planning permanent displays of artworks in the museum. Additionally, Mandara plans for, and executes storage strategies ranging from new infrastructure to meticulous rehousing of objects into archival grade storage for long term preservation of the collection. Mandara works closely with the Exhibition and Conservation teams to plan for artwork preparation, display and care for artworks.

Towards making MAP’s digital collection available publicly, Mandara works closely with the Marketing, Communications and Technology teams to develop the online database interface to regularly upload catalogue entries and bring visibility into the collection.

During her master’s studies, Mandara delved into the labour and care of working women in the context of household work, managing relationships/kinship, caregiving, community relationships and several other acts of love that are largely invisible when it comes to measuring ‘work’. Mandara believes these ideas extend well into the sphere of museums and modern art with certain sections of museum work, such as archiving, documentation and compliance-related paperwork taking a back seat in relation to more visible curatorial work.

Mandara is a trained dancer and has performed professionally prior to her career in research and museums. From this experience, Mandara is trying to expand the scope of what visual art means in South Asia – to also consider questions of labour, hierarchies amongst artists, artisans, community artists and thought in how to catalogue various artworks.

At the British Museum

During her time on the International Training Programme, Mandara was based in the Asia Department. Her UK Partner Placement was spent at Glasgow Museums.