Originally announced by founder Abhishek Poddar in 2016, the MAP Museum of Art & Photography in Bangalore, India, will open its doors on February 18, 2023.

Mark your calendars, because on February 18th the MAP Museum of Art & Photography in Bangalore will finally be unveiled to the public. Hosted in a five-storey, state-of-the-art 44,000 square-foot building, the museum is divided into key zones for galleries, library and research, art storage and restoration, and educational classrooms. It also includes an auditorium for programming, a retail space, and a fine-dining rooftop restaurant and café.
The museum building has been designed by leading Indian architect, Soumitro Ghosh, working under the guidance of the MAP Architectural Committee, led by Rahul Mehrotra. Committee members also include Mahrukh Tarapor and (the late) Martand Singh.

MAP Museum Bangalore
MAP Museum in Bangalore, India – Image courtesy MAP Museum

The collections

MAP was announced by founder Abhishek Poddar in 2016, who launched the museum digitally in 2020. With donations from Poddar and others, MAP’s collection includes more than 60,000 works.
The museum’s collection ranges widely and comprises different sections. The Pre-Modern Art collection holds some of the most important works of Indian art, encouraging a broader definition of ‘Indian art’ and serving to link historical art to contemporary practice.

MAP’s Textiles, Craft & Design collection includes excellent examples of textile traditions, while the section on Living Traditions displays a wide range of India’s regional and communal artistic practices. 

The museum also features examples from India’s printing and advertising industry from the nineteenth century to the arrival of the digital age in the late-twentieth century, as well as Photography collections, comprising work by photographers from the nineteenth-century to twentieth-century prints by significant photographers and contemporary photographers in India today. 

On top of that, the museum also features a Modern and Contemporary Art collections, with a wide cross-section of the most important trends and movements in Post-Independence Indian Art. 

To mark its opening, the museum is organizing a whole week of events, talks, and presentations, titled Art is Life: New Beginning, between the 18th and the 24th of February, 2023. 

More information and the full program of the opening week can be found here: map-india.org