What do after-hours at the museum look like?

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 from the informal work he had been doing for a while “based on the collective idea of reimagining the purpose of museums.” The workshop that I attended took place at the Wipro Library’s Mezzanine floor, informally called “the metal gallery” by the MAP team. “This gallery is usually always open to visitors. It is an extension to the library. Because it is located behind a glass façade, a lot of people miss out on it and assume that it’s not open to the public,” says Abiraami P S, the public programmes coordinator at MAP, who planned and organised the workshop along with Sushma Rao, a senior public programmes officer. These workshops invite greater levels of engagement with exhibitions, and are different from the usual staple of art museum programming.

Events, organised with the specific intention of engaging people directly, create a space for inspiration and creative play. The adults’ nights organised by the children’s Museum of Solutions in Mumbai have been sold out every time. These events allow adults to engage with the museum’s immersive spaces, usually reserved for kids, allowing you to rediscover your inner child. The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art sometimes organises dinner date nights with art, which typically include a meal and wine pairings. Last year, the museum offered an after-hours experience set inside Gulammohammed Sheikh’s immersive retrospective. Guests could indulge in a five-course meal by Cafe Dali. “Museums aren’t usually open late. And they don’t usually come with playlists, puzzles, and plated courses either. But we’re flipping the script…,” states the museum note. The KNMA has extended playful elements beyond its space in the Delhi NCR to Durbar Hall, Kochi, as well, with Game Day—Discovery Trail. Held this year on 22 March, participants were invited to take part in a discovery game inspired by visual search puzzles, and experience Gulammohammed Sheikh’s exhibition, Of worlds within worlds, differently.

The Museum of Art and Photography also has creative-play-based events as part of its regular lineup. In February, the museum went all out with the “horror” theme through Fright Night quizzes, testing your knowledge of Bollywood vs Hollywood scares, and a spooky edition of Make@MAP, which invited participants to take inspiration from everyday horrors to create thrilling artworks through collages. This trend of after-hours at museums is being seen across Asia now. “...Museums are keeping their lights on for longer, opening up their spaces in ways that feel both fresh and romantic. These late-night programmes aren’t just fun diversions; they’re a different way of experiencing a place: slower, more intimate, sometimes surprisingly creative,” states a piece in Conde Nast Traveller dated 21 December 2025. It mentions Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, which hosts film screenings, lectures and discussions after its closing hours. “Recent programmes under Art Deco Alive! featured films like Susheel Kurien’s Finding Carlton and Mira Nair’s India Cabaret, screened at the museum’s state-of-the-art Education Centre,” states the piece.

Meanwhile Bhagat’s workshop on gossip and storytelling was designed as a two-day intensive writing group to facilitate the imagination of new stories around objects in the gallery. About 140 of them were gifted to MAP by the Simon Digby Memorial Charity. Participants were invited to have both freewheeling and structured discussions around their interaction with museums and the politics of storytelling and gossip. They were encouraged to spend more time with objects from the gallery, before selecting one to work with closely. Based on free association writing and creative prompts, new narratives emerged around each selected piece.

Of the approximately 350 objects in the gallery, I was particularly fascinated by a little toy horse on wheels. It was part of a small collection of several similar horses, and the note on its provenance simply stated, “Toys: 19th/ 20th c brass, North India.” Through the workshop, my engagement with it took unexpected new directions. Initially, I wondered about its past life. In whose hands might it have originated? As a toy, I supposed its intended purpose would have been to be played with. If the horse had a voice, would it say that it missed the feeling of children’s hands rolling it along the floor as part of a make-believe game? What would its relationship be with the larger family of objects in the gallery? The objects in the gallery are maintained at a temperature of 23-24° C and 40-60% RH, as per established museum norms. Though this is technically the recommended ambient environment for humans, the room felt cold over an extended period of occupation, which informed our discussion on how the objects might experience the space. Given this environment and the object’s age, would its voice be grumpy and old, full of complaints about its creaky bones and the cold environment? Or would it think itself a strapping young thing full of confidence?

However, in imagining the museum full of objects as one large family and giving each object a voice accordingly, I found myself resorting to cliches about the roles typically played by family members, which felt limiting. It pushed me to think about the objects in a non-anthropocentric way, without imposing my expectations of a human-time-bound voice, or even of interpersonal relationships marked by cultural norms. In turn, this opened up an imaginative channel to reconsider the temporal lives of museum objects as completely different from those of the people there. The museum’s “after hours” now seemed replete with a different kind of life, with no one documenting the play of dimmed light on the contours of these objects, or the unexpected muted sounds—clicks, thuds, and rustling—heard in a space after dark.

Another participant, Sneha Sridhar, an educator working with the MAP Academy, also found the speculative storytelling component compelling. “This is an approach that has been used in a lot of different spaces. Google, for example, uses it as an ideating strategy for imagined futures. Using this storytelling method for engaging with museum collections was something different” she said. “Not only does it make the process more engaging, but also acknowledges the different ways of disseminating knowledge within the arts, and these learning approaches make arts education more accessible.”

Bhagat’s impulse behind designing this workshop was also linked to unearthing the provenance of objects, but through unconventional routes. “Histories of certain objects in museums are often not documented properly,” he says. “While curators or archivists may be able to talk about provenance in one way, there’s also space to do something in parallel. This differs from the rigid, often colonial process of objects being categorized, and then structured to align with the objective of museums, historically, as colonial institutions.”

He has done similar work previously in South Africa for the Goethe-Institut on the project “Museum Futures,” which reflects a collective push to decolonize the museum as an institution. The project has six participating museums across Africa and facilitates peer-to-peer learning between them to envision new methods of collecting, researching, mediating and engaging society.

While cataloguing and documentation may offer hard information and ways to make objects citable and traceable, for Bhagat, storytelling offers an alternative pathway for securing the truth. “Switch off the lights. What do the objects say?” he asks.

Rather than merely accepting the factual narratives offered by the object labels, imagining what the objects might be murmuring, muttering, or grumbling in the dark, allows the visitor to envision a much richer life for them.

C.S. Bhagya is a Bengaluru-based writer, educator and artist.