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Dream Your Museum

Installation view of Dream Your Museum at Akademie der Kunste, Pariser Platz, Berlin, Berlin Biennale 2022. The short film is projected on the gallery wall — a close-up of a hand holding a purple flower-like object against an open green field — while the physical installation of blue metal trunks, accumulated objects, and sitting mats is arranged on the gallery floor below. Photo credit: Dotgain.info, Berlin Biennale.

Khandakar Ohida’s DREAM YOUR MUSEUM (2022) turns her uncle’s 47-year hoard stamps, bottles, nails, holy books into a rogue archive. His collection rejects the order of institutional museums, letting objects clash and coexist on equal terms. The project asks: What counts as an artifact when the archive is built from the margins, not the center?…

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Khandakar Ohida

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Berlin Biennale for Contemporary art 2022, Berlin , Germany

Dream your Museum ( Film and Installation )

Khandakar Ohida possesses a sensibility informed by the socio-political hierarchies that shape vernacular identities. In DREAM YOUR MUSEUM (2022), she inquires into the conditions of capital, class privilege, and the persistence of colonial frameworks that exclude certain bodies from participating in official archival spaces. The artist draws on the story of her uncle, Khandakar Selim, a compulsive hoarder who has amassed a vast number of items in his home over forty-seven years. The artist’s installation is a condensed recreation of his collection, which proposes a museum of memorabilia. However, a few questions arise: Can a book of stamps coexist with vintage alcohol bottles? Do jars of nails or ordinary plastic bags count as permissible artifacts for a museum? What does the cohabitation of holy books in a precarious space of care say about a country reeling under sectarian angst?

Installation view of Dream Your Museum at Akademie der Kunste, Berlin, 2022. The film is projected on the wall — showing Khandakar Selim at work in his home, surrounded by his accumulated objects — while the installation of trunks and collected items is displayed on the floor below. Photo credit: Dotgain.info, Berlin Biennale.
Display At Akademi Der Kunste, Pariser Platz , Berlin

Far removed from the nationalistic impulse that shapes institutional sites, Selim has made use of metal trunks as containers for his domestic museum. Found in most middle-class South Asian households, they are ubiquitous as long-term storage solutions. However, the premise of organization is discarded here in favour of a nonlinear relationship with time, as the objects jump across contexts and are accorded uniform value. In its naïve genesis, this portable museum unwittingly defies the authority, surveillance, and tactile prohibitions of conventional museums. Viewers are invited to leisurely peruse the items in Selim’s boxes, which reveal the childlike curiosity of a demure man on the margins, who dared to dream.

Film still from Dream Your Museum, 2022. [NOTE: This file is a TIFF and must be converted to JPEG or PNG before uploading to WordPress.] Photo credit: Anand Kumar Ekbote.
Film still : Dream Your Museum, 2022

DREAM YOUR MUSEUM delves into the tension between postcolonial imaginaries of preservation and the micro-universe of a Muslim inhabitant of rural India. A conversation between two figures in the short film that completes the installation establishes a dreamscape with the items on display—animated by the vivid imagination of an accumulator.

(Curatorial text: Berlin Biennale, Najrin Islam, 2022)

Film poster for Dream Your Museum (2022), a film by Khandakar Ohida. The poster features two stones resting on dark, earthy ground, with the film title and credits listed above. The Berlin Biennale logo appears at the bottom. Duration: 18 minutes 15 seconds, colour, sound.
A Film Poster
Full panoramic view of the Dream Your Museum installation at Akademie der Kunste, Berlin, 2022. All blue metal trunks are open and arranged symmetrically around a central spread of Khandakar Selim's collected objects displayed on the gallery floor. Photo credit: Dotgain.info, Berlin Biennale.
At Akademi Der Kunste, Pariser Platz , Berlin

Details of the installation:

Overhead installation view of Dream Your Museum at Akademie der Kunste, Berlin, 2022. The darkened gallery space shows the full arrangement of blue metal trunks and collected objects spread across sitting mats on the floor, with the film projection visible at the far end.
Detail view of an open blue metal trunk in the Dream Your Museum installation, revealing a dense arrangement of eclectic objects: old photographs, printed images, small bottles, books, a vinyl record, a horse figurine, coins, stamps, and a large red pen — the contents of Selim's domestic archive.
Detail view of the Dream Your Museum installation — overhead close-up of objects displayed on a mat, including a gramophone record, stamp collection albums, coins, small framed prints, and other accumulated items from Khandakar Selim's domestic museum.
Installation view of Dream Your Museum at the Jameel Prize 7 Exhibition, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2024. The work is installed in a warm amber-walled gallery: the film is projected on the rear wall showing a rural landscape with a tree and a dirt road, while framed objects and small works are mounted on the side walls and display cases are arranged on the gallery floor.
Jameel Prize 7 exhibition display at V&A, South Kensington, London
Installation view of Dream Your Museum at Hayy Jameel, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The darkened gallery features the film projected on the rear wall — a scene of Khandakar Selim in his home surrounded by accumulated objects — with the metal trunks and collected items arranged on a raised platform in the foreground, and a gramophone visible to the right.
Display view at Hayy Jameel, Saudi Arabia (2026)

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