Mending Inheritances: Between Artistic and Institutional Care

While museums collect and preserve objects in accordance with institutional concepts, artists often work with materials that have been passed down to them through family ties and lived forms of care. What kinds of responsibility, forms of repair, and what knowledge arise from these different relationships to the materials that have been handed down? Where do artistic and institutional practices align, and where do they differ fundamentally?

On the occasion of the exhibition *Archive of Divine Possessions*, artist Bhasha Chakrabarti and conservator Marika Kesler will come together for a public conversation at TA T.

Building on Chakrabarti’s exhibition, the discussion will address questions of care, repair (understood not as the restoration of an original state, but as a visible and ongoing engagement with loss, damage, and change), conservation, material histories, and the possibilities and limitations of preserving fragile legacies.

*Archive of Divine Possessions* brings together textiles and religious objects from the artist’s family heritage, which she explores through practices of archiving, painting, collage, moving images, and spatial arrangement.

The exhibition raises questions about touch, transformation, preservation, and the shifting meanings that materials take on across generations and in different contexts.

Marika Kesler is a conservator at the Ethnological Museum Berlin of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK) and specializes in the conservation and care of textile collections. In her engagement with culturally significant materials and their histories of use, preservation, and restoration, she brings her own perspective to questions of care and material heritage. Together, Chakrabarti and Kesler reflect on different ways of engaging with inherited materials, ranging from intimate and familial relationships to institutional conservation practices. In doing so, they discuss how artistic and museum-based approaches differ, overlap, and can learn from one another.

The conversation will take place within the exhibition and will be moderated by Felix Sattler, Chief Curator of TA T.

IN ENGLISH