by Priya Malhotra
We stand in front of a painting and extol its brilliance. We listen to a piece of music and call it genius. We watch a film and admire its evocativeness. We hold a beautifully designed object and marvel at its simplicity. What we don’t see — what we almost never ask about — are the versions that came before.
The sketch that didn’t work. The canvas painted over. The idea abandoned halfway through. The sculpture that cracked. The notes in the margin that were crossed out.
Art, when we encounter it publicly, looks certain. But art is made in uncertainty.
That’s the simple but powerful idea behind Moving Archives, an exhibition opening this February at Bikaner House in Delhi, curated by Ranjita Chaney and Ruchika Soi. Instead of focusing only on finished works, the show turns toward the material around them — drafts, drawings, scripts, research, documentation. It asks a very basic question: What happens to the process once the product is done?
Because process doesn’t disappear. It just goes out of sight. Think about a painter in a studio. The final canvas might look confident and deliberate. But underneath it are layers — earlier compositions, colors tried and rejected, shapes adjusted and corrected. There are sketchbooks filled with studies that never left the room. There are experiments that didn’t succeed. None of that shows up in the gallery label. Yet without it, the final painting would not exist.
The same is true in other fields. Writers produce draft after draft before a novel feels right. Musicians test melodies and rhythms before a song settles into place. Filmmakers shoot more than they use and shape the story in the edit. Designers build prototypes that wobble, collapse, or feel wrong before landing on the object we admire.
Across disciplines, we are used to seeing the polished result. We are not used to seeing the struggle. Maybe that’s because we like the idea of mastery. We like to imagine that great art arrives fully formed. It’s comforting. It makes genius feel clean.
But creation is rarely clean. It is messy. It involves doubt. It requires throwing things away.
And that is where this exhibition becomes interesting — not just for the art world, but for anyone who has ever tried to make something.
To archive an artistic practice, as the curators describe it, means keeping track of more than just the finished work. It means preserving the traces: the thinking, the revisions, the context in which something was made. Not freezing them in a vault, but keeping them accessible and meaningful.
Historically, much of Indian art has existed through teaching, apprenticeship, oral transmission, and community memory rather than formal institutions. As a result, many practices — especially those outside major cities or commercial circuits — were never systematically recorded.
When something isn’t documented, it risks being overlooked. When it is documented, it has a better chance of being remembered. That is why archiving isn’t just about storage. It shapes what future generations will know.
The curators frame archives as active rather than static — not dusty storage rooms, but living spaces that can be exhibited, questioned, and revisited. They raise practical and pressing questions: how can archives help teach art histories that are still unfolding and often under-documented? And if certain artistic narratives have been sidelined, how can independent efforts help build a fuller, more diverse record?
Put simply: Who gets remembered? And just as important — who doesn’t? These questions sound large, but they begin with something small and intimate: the sketch that almost no one sees.
When an artist keeps a notebook, that notebook holds more than ideas. It holds hesitation. It holds change. It shows the moment before something worked. If that notebook is preserved, it tells a fuller story. If it isn’t, we’re left with the illusion that the finished work sprang into existence effortlessly.
There is something reassuring about seeing process. It reminds us that excellence is built. In the age of smartphones, artists leave behind even more traces. A voice note recorded on a walk. A quick photo of a texture. A half-formed thought typed into a notes app. Files renamed over and over. Some of this material will be deleted. Some will survive by accident. Some will be intentionally preserved.
We are archiving ourselves constantly now — often without realizing it. But digital material is fragile. Platforms shut down. Files disappear. Technology changes. So the question of what survives is still very real. At the exhibition’s public forum, artists, archivists, policy makers, and technologists will discuss issues like sustainability, access, ownership, and even the role of artificial intelligence in preservation.
Yet beneath all the logistics is something more human. When we see only finished work, we encounter authority. When we see the process behind it, we encounter effort. Effort is relatable. The things artists throw away tell us that doubt is part of creation. That revision is normal. That getting it wrong is not failure but movement.
There is a quiet relief in that.
Perhaps we celebrate masterpieces because they look resolved. They feel complete in a world that rarely is. But the real story of art lies in what came before — in the drafts, the discarded versions, the adjustments.
Moving Archives doesn’t reject the finished artwork. It simply asks us to widen the frame. To see the painting and imagine the layers beneath it. To see the sculpture and think of the sketches that preceded it. To understand that what we admire is the result of countless decisions, many of which led nowhere.
The things artists throw away are not waste. They are evidence. Evidence that art is not magic. It is work. It is persistence. It is thinking made visible over time.
And maybe, in recognizing that, we become more generous — not only toward artists, but also toward our own unfinished attempts at making something meaningful.
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