Salar Jung Museum
The Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad holds one of the largest one man art collections in the world, assembled by Nawab Mir Yousuf Ali Khan Salar Jung III through decades of correspondence and acquisition across continents. The engagement, led by Shivani Joshi, was asked to give that collection a contemporary digital voice: a language younger audiences meet on their own screens, carrying the museum’s continental legacy without diluting it.
The work positioned Salar Jung as a living cultural surface, where the ceramics of China, the sculpture of Europe and the miniatures of Persia sit alongside storytelling designed for the feed, and it produced Deepa Kala, an evening built around a single holding.
Translate a collection famous for its breadth into formats a digital audience will follow. Bring younger Hyderabad into the galleries. Build ongoing conversation around the institution through creators, youth programming and cultural events, so that the museum functions as an active cultural hub in feed and forum as much as in gallery.
Cultural positioning for the digital presence. A content strategy across video, visual reinterpretation and gallery production. Contemporary artworks, posters and reinterpretations of the classical holdings. Recorded gallery walkthroughs and exhibition highlight films. Online gallery showcases. Creator collaborations, youth programming and cultural event coordination. Press. One experiential evening, conceived and produced end to end.
A Masterpieces Voiceover Series narrated the museum’s most iconic holdings, their history and significance, reaching 50,000 plus views, 2,500 likes and 115 plus shares. Voices of Art personified iconic works through first person storytelling, each piece narrating its own history and emotion. It reached 90,000 plus views, 4,100 plus likes and 55 plus comments. Walkthrough and highlight films let visitors explore the galleries before they arrived, extending the visit into the days that preceded it.
The evening was built around one holding, the museum’s lamps and chandeliers, and the observation that light, across civilisations, has carried devotion, celebration, knowledge and the record of human progress. Objects usually held behind glass became the organising logic of a night of performance, storytelling and sensory experience, the play of light through the galleries reframed as living craft, ritual and time.
Ten plus creators from Hyderabad’s heritage, food and city communities documented the light, the gallery moods and the lived experience of the space. The content reached 104,000 plus views, 2,200 plus likes and 50 plus stories. It extended the life of the evening well past the night itself.
For alignment with heritage and visual storytelling ahead of reach. The cohort ran from 5,000 to 70,500 followers, deliberately local, with content styles that already captured architecture, light and atmosphere. That is what let the museum experience travel as something authentic to the city.
A museum present in the daily feed of the city it serves. A creator relationship rooted in Hyderabad. A cultural property, Deepa Kala, that the institution can restage around another holding. A body of film and reinterpretation it continues to use.
