National Gallery of Modern Art
The National Gallery of Modern Art was established at Jaipur House in Delhi in 1954 and holds one of the most significant collections of modern Indian art in the country. The engagement, led by Shivani Joshi, addressed a single question: how does an institution of this standing read to an audience that meets art first on a phone screen, and how does it do so with its scholarship intact.
The answer ran across three surfaces at once. Curatorial storytelling on the gallery's own channels, creator collaborations that carried the collection to audiences the institution had never reached and two experiential evenings, staged inside the gallery, that turned paintings into scent and then into taste.
Open the archive to a wider public. Give the modernists a presence in contemporary digital culture. Hold the intellectual register of the institution in every collaborator, caption and cut. The measure was whether digital momentum could feed physical footfall, with followers moving from feed to gallery.
Cultural positioning for the gallery's digital surfaces. A twelve part reel series through the work of Nicholas Roerich and Amrita Sher-Gil, tracing symbolism, mountain landscapes, feminist framing and the modernist movements around them. Companion content on lesser known works in the collection, reading chromatic language alongside international correlations. Video direction for the series. Creator curation and hosting. Two experiential programmes conceived, designed and produced end to end, with collateral, scent kits and institutional keepsakes. Press and documentation for both.
An Artists’ Quote Series spotlighted the collection through daily showcases, drawing 3,800 plus likes and 50 plus comments across its run. An Artefact Voiceover Series narrated iconic works as story led short films, reaching 60,100 plus views and 1,500 plus likes. A creator collaboration programme placed aligned voices inside the galleries; the strongest single reel reached 1.1 million views and 104,000 likes, with further reels between 2,100 and 9,100 views each.
The first edition, An Olfactory Experience, translated Roerich and Sher-Gil into fragrance. Colour became scent notes, landscapes became mood and the evening ran as an invite only gathering on the gallery lawns with bespoke perfumery inspired by the artists’ languages. More than twenty creators took part on the ground. The content reached 474,000 plus views, 8,000 plus likes and 120 plus stories.
The second edition, Mixologists and Maestros, held the structure and changed the sense. The palettes and narratives of Roerich, Sher-Gil and Raja Ravi Varma were read as recipes and served as non alcoholic mixology inside the gallery’s historic spaces. Twelve plus creators took part. The content reached 67,000 plus views, 1,000 plus likes and 110 plus stories. Across the two, the gallery gained a repeatable cultural property it can restage around a new sense, a new collection or a new season.
Alignment with heritage, culture and visual storytelling, ahead of follower count. The first edition’s cohort ran from 27,500 to 259,000 followers; the second from 14,200 to 340,000. Their existing content styles captured architecture, light and atmosphere, which is what let the evenings travel as authentic record. Each creator was hosted, walked through the galleries and given time with the works before anything was filmed.
A gallery whose feed reads as an extension of its curatorial voice. A creator relationship the institution can call on again. Two evenings the national press and the creators’ own audiences carried well beyond the night, and a format the institution owns.
