“Meeting Abhishek Poddar a day ahead of the virtual launch of his long-anticipated project, the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP) in Bengaluru, I cannot resist posing that embarrassingly ingenuous question: Why a museum? Was there a formative experience early on in his life? “I could say it was the 1979 visit to the Louvre and to other great European museums on my first overseas trip, but I would be lying,” says Poddar, 52. In truth, MAP is the high point of a life marked out in art. Having collected since the 1980s, curated exhibitions, commissioned work, and made lasting friendships with artists, Poddar is now building an art space with the widest range in India. The first privately promoted institution to house an archive of Indian fine art photography alongside modern, contemporary, medieval and folk art, MAP is coming up opposite the government-run Venkatappa Art Gallery on Kasturba Road, a space Poddar had proposed to overhaul into a modern museum in 2016 before shrill opposition from a group of local artists led to his withdrawing from the project.”

Read the full story by Open Magazine here.