There have been mainly two approaches to preservation and conservation of cultural artefacts and monuments. One approach, favoured by formal institutions like museums and by conservation experts, aims at complete restoration (as far as it is possible), seeking to recreate the original form. The other approach, often seen in informal collections or community archives, embraces the changes wrought by time. It celebrates ruins, fragments, and eclectic remains. These remnants evoke historical depth, not through grand narratives or a sense of wholeness, but by drawing attention to what has been lived through and what has been lost or gained — through cracks, erosion, and, in some cases, evolution in the weathered forms.

The Government Museum, located in Egmore, Chennai embodies the friction between these two approaches. Its compound gives rise to a unique spatial and temporal disorientation. Here, the dense pressures of city life collide with invasive wilderness and the wreckage of history, while the enduring resonance of Mahabalipuram’s sculptural legacy reverberates through the site. Together, these forces mingle to present an unconventional archaeology of memory.

My first visit to the Egmore Museum, as it is known colloquially, was in 2019, during the second edition of the Chennai Photo Biennale. Since then, I have returned twice. My most recent visit was part of my ongoing project, Third Bodies — a conceptual exploration that engages with museum relics and dioramas, particularly with the zoological and anthropological departments of government museums in India and beyond.

Drawing on the familiarity of my previous visits, I spent an entire day within the museum, and the estate that surrounds it. I wandered through the galleries, photographing the displays sealed in glass cases that were stained, fungus-lined, and shimmered with reflected light. 

Between Ruin and Renewal

It is impossible not to be captivated by the sheer vastness of the museum’s collection, particularly within the zoological and anthropological wings, and the quiet grandeur of the building’s architectural heritage. The aged artefacts, the crumbling stairways, the soaring ceilings — many of these structures appear to have been untouched for decades; so fragile that no one dares to clean them. And yet, it is precisely this sense of decay, this refusal to be polished or restored that seems to call everyone back to Egmore. 

There is a strange, spectral beauty in these untreated spaces. In the dioramas, the seams are more visible, and the wear and tear are dramatically pronounced. In their ‘wild’ state, they no longer orient us toward rational inquiry, but instead appeal to our irrational musings. In their terrain, human interventions seem violent or hostile. At another glance, this space is reminiscent of an old century home overrun by ruinous structures, fading miniatures, and souvenirs, all wrapped in a coat of dust. The shelves have pieces of nature, framed and domesticated, but slowly returning to what they would have been if they had decayed in their natural states.

Despite its aging interiors, the museum is also steadily undergoing renewal. A spacious, modern cafeteria opened in 2024, welcoming visitors. New exhibition halls have been built, with more still under construction. Despite these upgrades, none can compete with the legacy of the original buildings. Within the grounds of the same estate stands the Connemara Public Library with a spectacular collection of books and a reading room, which opens early in the morning and offers quiet refuge. The entire estate remains accessible to the public throughout the day as well. With the Egmore estate at its centre, this Chennai neighbourhood stands as a compelling example of a thriving museum precinct that functions as a socially-relevant, instrumental space.

An Aesthetic of Discontinuity

In recent decades, contemporary art has increasingly responded to experiences of mass destruction, displacement, and exclusion. Many artists have turned toward historical memory rooted in material traces. Across artistic practice and art discourse, we are seeing the rise of an aesthetic of discontinuity, where one finds beauty not in completeness, but in the scars, fractures, and visible signs of repair.

These objects carry the marks of colonial and imperial erasure and neglect through decay, fragmentation, cracks, and disfigurations. At the same time, overall consumption patterns leaning towards the virtual or disposable, from fast fashion to music and books, have given material objects, which endure, a new kind of resonance. In contrast to digital immediacy, these relics draw us back to a sensory exploration of the material past; to engage physically with history’s debris, its interruptions, and its unfinished trajectories.

This fluid logic shapes the museum’s semi-public corridors and pathways outside its central halls — sculpture gardens, gated enclosures, and unlabelled display areas. An atmospheric museology unfolds across stacked stone sculptures of gods, goddesses, and the enlightened; of varying species and hybrid fantastical beasts that lie together, weather-stained, becoming a collective sculptural and monumental edifice.

Partially buried fragments appear as part of previous curatorial narratives hosted by the museum, but also as by-products of excess, of maintenance cycles and bureaucratic sanctions. The arrangements of these decayed museum relics blur the frontiers of museum exhibits and their residue.

‘Ruins in Reverse’

The ruins of Egmore form a semi-crafted mise-en-scène, with the ruins situated somewhere between care and abandonment. Relics — some stamped with unique codes linked to the museum’s cataloguing process — from heterogeneous time periods are superimposed on each other due to the museum’s “aesthetic surplus.”  The material exceeds the institution’s ability to properly curate them with precise intentions, and so they are abandoned in the museum’s compound. 

They evoke the notion of “ruins in reverse” — a phrase coined by artist Robert Smithson in his 1967 essay A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, which documents his trip into the industrial landscape just outside New York City. In it, he “fictionalised” the landscape, reimaginging what was already there to foreground other, often non-human, temporalities. As Smithson puts it in the essay, the industrial “monuments” were “memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures.”

A site of memory production, there is a reflective nostalgia that hovers over the ruins of Egmore born of museum visitors who encounter fragmentary objects from the past on their meandering walks. Visitors reconstruct rational timelines by imagining narratives, and in doing so make meaning and derive pleasure from the surplus of form. These objects can — depending on the visitor’s frame of mind — lend themselves to ironic, comic, disturbing, or profoundly moving commentary and may, just as easily, be dismissed because of their inconclusive and fragmentary nature.

But the ruins of Egmore are not about the museum’s failure to maintain its acquired objects. But rather about the understanding that the creation of “monuments,” in their oldest and most original sense, represents human creativity. Any cultural artifact awakens in the beholder a sense of the life cycle: an emergence ripe with symbolism relevant to a specific era, and then a gradual, inevitable decline into ruin, until it becomes a nostalgic and sometimes commemorative material remnant of the past.

What we witness here, however, is not this idea of a “romantic ruin,” but rather, artefacts that have been deserted, much like Passaic’s industrial monuments that Smithson encountered. The museum presents a case of “ruins in reverse,” where the artefacts don’t “fall into ruin” but “rise” into undetermined futures.

The ruins of Egmore demonstrate how aesthetic and conceptual value can emerge when artefacts fall outside of certain formalities of care. Unrestricted access could allow visitors to also witness and experience this “museum-in-the-making,” forever in the process of being created and reinvented.

Thasil Suhara Backer is a self-taught art practitioner from Kerala, formally trained in Theatre Arts. Over the last eight years, he has developed hybrid forms, synthesising photography, sculptural assemblages, essays, and performances.