As a recipient of the UNESCO International Fund for Promotion of Culture (IFPC) Award 2014-2015, and in partnership with the Lahore Museum, the Inheriting Harappa project will be hosting a special exhibition with an educational mission in the three cities of Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad. Our special exhibition called Rediscovering Harappa: Through the Five Elements features a set of original Hara
ppan artefacts from the permanent collections of the Lahore Museum juxtaposed with the clay works of two contemporary potters: Mohammad Nawaz and Sheherezade Alam. A unique feature of the exhibition is the creative artwork in the form of maps, drawings and mixed media collages that artistically interpret significant aspects of Harappan material culture. These interpretive artworks have been produced by collective groups of young Pakistani artists, designers and architects, representing some ten different educational institutions in Pakistan. During a summer intensive Internship Programme organized by the Lahore Museum, our ‘artist-interns’ closely examined Harappan objects and engaged with the Lahore Museum’s Harappan collection and studied the published archaeological literature, generating animated discussions and collaborative designs for installation objects and educational activity books in this project. Drawing on these works on display in the special exhibition, Inheriting Harappa’s Educational and Public Programme will be organizing a series of exciting and intellectually stimulating events, open to all. Especially for school children, we have lined up lively talks with creative educational activities and pottery demonstrations that will make the Harappan world both inspiring and fun. For our visitors, we are planning guided tours, gallery talks and a public lecture series featuring distinguished speakers comprising world-renowned archaeologists, anthropologists, writers, historians and ecologists. Inheriting Harappa at the Lahore Museum
Effective since 1894, the Lahore Museum is the oldest museum in Pakistan, and thus its collection of approximately 60,000 objects represents the cultural treasures of the vast Indian subcontinent. More than that, it is a symbol of diversity – a melting pot of Buddhist, Jain, Hindu, Sikh, Pagan, Christian and Islamic ideals and concepts represented in the form of sculptures, manuscripts, paintings, textiles, ceramics, metalwork, seals and coinage and much more. Nowhere else can one find evidence of such pluralism in Pakistan. Particularly compelling is its Pre- and Proto-historic collections that include artefacts from Neolithic Mehrgarh to the sophisticated urban metropolitan centres of the third millennium BC Indus Valley Civilization, such as Harappa and Mohenjodaro. For most visitors strolling through the museum galleries, however, the relevance of this material has been lost. The Inheriting Harappa project, therefore, aspires to connect us to those ancient people who made, used and cherished these artefacts in their times by bridging cultural and chronological gaps between objects and viewers — especially by retelling the stories that bring the human connections of these artefacts alive through its visually evocative special exhibition and dynamic educational programme. These enigmatic stories, we hope will inspire our nearly 300,000 annual visitors at the Lahore Museum, to initiate meaningful dialogues with many of the objects on display in the galleries.
