New Delhi, April 2 -- Museums have long been looked upon as dormant repositories of objects. However, today, these spaces are trying to break that perception by emerging as pulsating living entities. The Museum of Art and Photography, Bengaluru, for instance, has been adding an interactive element to their galleries and exhibits. Last year, I attended Gossip After Hours: A Storytelling Workshop to "imagine conversations and other lives of artworks and artefacts." The workshop promised an antidote to my usual response of overwhelm and fatigue to a museum's surfeit of objects, interpretations and information.

For Heeten Bhagat, "a Zimbabwean-born, currently-floating" researcher, who conceptualised and ran the workshop, the idea emerged fro...