Jadughar: House of Magic

Jadughar: House of Magic is a travelling, participatory exhibition curated by PAPRIKA Collective.

It explores how museums make us feel - emotionally, physically, and communally. Rather than presenting objects behind glass, it invites visitors to be in touch – both literally and imaginatively – through contacting surfaces: to handle, imagine, and respond.

Drawing inspiration from traditions of embodied knowledge, lived experience, and practices rooted in health and wellbeing, the exhibition offers a space not for static preservation, but for active reflection, dreaming, and remembering.

In the spirit of the Jadughar - a Hindi word for ‘museum or “house of magic,” the exhibition opens itself to wonder, memory, and transformation. Its timing during South Asian Heritage Month (July 18th – Aug 17th) honours diasporic traditions of storytelling, spiritual imagination, and artistic resistance.

Emerging in the post-pandemic moment - when many still carry the weight of disconnection and loss – this exhibition offers the museum as a place of care and encounter. It asks what it means to be in touch again - with others, with place, and with the objects we often pass by? It is not a museum of answers, but of feelings, speculations, and small, powerful gestures.

Here, museum-making becomes a form of conjuring: not only what has been lost, but what we still long for. As a group of creative minds, we gently poses questions: What is a museum? Who decides what belongs? Could the shoes you’re wearing today end up in a museum, years from now? And in the spirit of physicist Richard Feynman’s thought experiment - if we could leave just one feeling or one object to help future generations understand us, what would we choose? Jadughar: House of Magic is one chapter in the broader series Museopathy: A Moving Museum—a project that reimagines the museum not as a place of fixed truths, but as an evolving space shaped by emotion, encounter, and co-creation. Across each iteration, Museopathy celebrates the museum as something porous, sensory, and collective—built not just by institutions, but by artists, children, archivists, residents, and dreamers alike.