“While conflict is unpleasant, turning our faces away does not remove them. The first step of healing a wound is to accept and acknowledge it.”

The “Gallery of Disputes”, designed by Mansi Thakkar, aims to bring forth various kinds of conflicts and their causes in the context of our social fabric. Most often interlinked, these conflicts and their causes may become hard to define and understand. As a museum that aims to reach out to a wide audience with varying backgrounds, a decision to convey the content of the gallery through stories was made. ‘Museum culture’ may be western, but ‘story-telling’ is universal. Drawing from structures and motifs in animal fables like the ‘Panchatantra’ by Visnu Sarma and fiction like ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell, the gallery follows the story of a Donkey, a beast of burden living in a forest, with a social fabric as complex and conflicted as in the human world. The story unfolds as the visitor walks through the gallery through mediums such as sounds, props, animations, light, shadow, etc. The visitor is treated to a carefully structured narrative whose elements may be followed in order to glean the story.