Jadughar: House of Magic

Jadughar: House of Magic

16th July – 4th September

Opening Reception 16th July 18:00-20:00

Free Entry. No booking required.

Location: Swiss Cottage Gallery, 88 Avenue Road, NW3 3HA

Jadughar: House of Magic is a traveling, participatory exhibition that explores how museums make us feel – emotionally, physically, and communally. While it welcomes everyone, special attention has been given to the experience of children and young people, with elements designed to invite imaginative play, tactile interaction, and personal reflection. Rather than presenting objects behind glass, it invites visitors to be in touch – both literally and imaginatively – through contacting surfaces: to handle, imagine, and respond. Drawing inspiration from traditions of embodied knowledge, lived experience, and practices rooted in health and wellbeing, the exhibition offers a space not for static preservation, but for active reflection, dreaming, and remembering.

Emerging in the post-pandemic moment – when many still carry the weight of disconnection and loss – this exhibition offers the museum as a place of care and encounter. It asks what it means to be in touch again – with others, with place, and with the objects we often pass by? It is not a museum of answers, but of feelings, speculations, and small, powerful gestures.

In the spirit of the Jadughar – a Hindi word for ‘museum or “house of magic,” the exhibition opens itself to wonder, memory, and transformation. Its timing during South Asian Heritage Month (July 18^th – Aug 17th) honors diasporic traditions of storytelling, spiritual imagination, and artistic resistance. Here, museum-making becomes a form of conjuring: not only what has been lost, but what we still long for.

As a group of creative minds, we gently poses questions: What is a museum? Who decides what belongs? Could the shoes you’re wearing today end up in a museum, years from now? And in the spirit of physicist Richard Feynman’s thought experiment – if we could leave just one feeling or one object to help future generations understand us, what would we choose?

Jadughar: House of Magic is one chapter in the broader series Museopathy: A Moving Museum—a project that reimagines the museum not as a place of fixed truths, but as an evolving space shaped by emotion, encounter, and co-creation. Across each iteration, Museopathy celebrates the museum as something porous, sensory, and collective—built not just by institutions, but by artists, children, archivists, residents, and dreamers alike.