41st anniversary of The Times of India, Bengaluru: Troika of science, culture, experiment

Time of India

18-07-2025

Science Gallery Bengaluru is a two-way bridge between research and the public with an explicit mission to bring science back into culture through three commitments: Public engagement, mentorship of young adults (15-30 years of age), and a pioneering Public Lab Complex.
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The gallery is part of an international network of galleries in London, Melbourne, and Monterrey – and it's Asia's first, India's only, and the world's largest such gallery. It's the only freestanding gallery in the network not based on a university campus. Established with founding support from the Karnataka govt with close relationships with Indian Institute of Science and National Centre for Biological Sciences, the Gallery is built through public-private partnership.
We do three things at the Gallery: public engagement, public labs, and civic spaces. The public engagement complex has exhibition halls, an open studio, and lecture rooms which we have in common with other galleries in the Science Gallery Network. Unique to Bengaluru is the Public Lab Complex with its five experimental spaces: a nature lab, a materials lab, a food lab, a new media lab and a theory lab. In addition, we have civic spaces like the reading room, a patio, a portico and an outdoor café, where young adults are invited pursue their own activities together.
If people want to meet regularly to try out natural dyes or build electric guitars or hold hackathons or start a sci-fi reading group or screen films, there is space at the Gallery.
Science Gallery Bengaluru is a public space for knowledge. Such spaces began with Cabinets of Curiosities in the 16th century with collections from explorations across the world, and belonged to wealthy individuals. These gave way to natural historical collections-based public museums which were followed by the Exploratorium-inspired science centre model.
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Early museums were full of artistic descriptions of their collection.
Art described nature. Knowing something incredibly well was inseparable from visually representing it incredibly accurately – think of early botanical and anatomical drawings. Knowledge was enfolded into natural philosophy and moral philosophy and not yet siloed into disciplines as we take for granted today.
One remarkable thing about these early museums was that the object of study, the people studying them, and the public were in the same space.
That relationship between the public and the object or idea to know about, ways of knowing it, and why that matters is now lost. We believe in the value of reconstituting this relationship for today and we do that through our year-long research festivals.
Science Gallery Bengaluru is a space for open research. The Public Lab Complex at the Gallery draws on an inspiring story in modern Indian history. Chandrashekhar Venkata Raman is India's only Nobel Laureate in the natural sciences and nearly a century later, remains the only one who studied, worked and died in the country.
What is less known is that for the first 10 years of his professional life, he was an accountant with Indian Finance Service.
Interestingly, in the early morning and in the evenings, he conducted experiments in acoustics and later optics at Indian Association for Cultivation of Science in Calcutta, for a small bench fee, and that research eventually brought him the Nobel Prize.
We do not have that kind of space today. The nature of scientific research has changed: it has become highly specialised, expensive and is behind institutional walls.
We believe in the value of a space to nurture research ideas and a life of experimentation outside academia and industry but in collaboration with both.
Science Gallery Bengaluru disrupts learning silos. In India, we take disciplinary divergence to an extreme. Most of us do not have specialised conversations with people who are not professionally interfacing with us. It starts early. Engineers study with engineers, artists with artists, architects with architects, leading to an unfortunate narrowing of what students learn and consider is worth learning without being challenged on their assumptions.
No historian at the tender formative stage of his or her career is challenged by an engineer and no designer at that age has been challenged by a biologist in an academic setting.
This has consequences. The young have no opportunity to continuously defend their opinions and choices to someone who will be around for three to four years at the same dining table or at table tennis within the same institutional walls. This is changing in a few institutions but the thinking needs to take root more broadly.
We believe there is value in trying to disrupt this and we do so through our mentorship initiative.
Eighteen months after opening the doors to the Gallery, the three words that have become my Ursa Minor are 'Science, Culture and Experiment'. Science includes the human, the social and the natural sciences as equally important ways of knowing and of producing rigorous knowledge. Culture, because art – as understood by professionals – is just as distant from everyday life as scientific research is.
An expanded imagination of culture that envelopes creative expression across the arts and sciences is, perhaps, more hospitable.
Finally, Experiment. This institution is in itself an experiment. It is not a metaphor. The Public Lab Complex allows incubation of ideas and the conduct of collaborative experiments.
On 19 January 2024, we opened to the doors to our purpose-built premises with the exhibition Carbon and, most recently, SCI560 – both online and offline.
While the building was under construction, in October 2019, we started with public engagement programmes at other locations in the city, including at metro-stations with two physical exhibitions before the pandemic: Elements and Submerge. We were fully online during the pandemic and developed Phytopia, India's first fully online digital exhibition, followed by Contagion and Psyche.
All exhibition-seasons have successfully carried the vibe of a research festival.
Lectures, masterclasses, workshops, participatory programmes, a food festival and a film festival are integral to the exhibitions that change in August every year. We also develop online open courseware, activity handbooks and an exhibition-in-a-box every year that outlives and archives the exhibition for travel.
Why create a new model for a public space for knowledge? Why mix up the human, social, and natural sciences with engineering, art and design? What the coming together of the artist and scholar may allow for – minimally – is reflexive self-knowledge about making art, and about making knowledge. On a good day, it extends and expands both scientific research and the work of art.
In less than a month, we will launch a new exhibition, Calorie. Come over and hang out.