Lab Culture is a two-part exhibition, intended to bring forth the nature of life and work at the National Center for Biological Sciences. NCBS is popularly known for its dedicated research and practice in diverse fields of science but little do we know of its cultural bearings. People, places and practices that define a cultural landscapes, are also the driving force behind the groundbreaking work at NCBS. Through these two exhibitions, the curatorial exercise intends to engage its audiences in multi-layered narratives about behaviours and responses.

These exhibitions found roots in the creative ideas from the science day competition, which was held in November 2018. Participating labs had then put together a series of exhibits to showcase their work and research interests. The curatorial concept has thus, emerged from understanding these exhibits and further conversations with lab researchers of the ten winning entries. Furthermore, the curatorial narrative made a naive attempt of tying together, five similar or related projects in both exhibitions.

Each exhibition was designed to invite the viewers into a poetic experience of behaviour, before they stroll into a more scientific dialogue about responses and stimuli. We called this the landscape of biology. There were interactive exhibits, created for ease of understanding and to introduce an element of play. As the viewers walk deeper into the space, they would be a part of the labs at NCBS: through audio-video recordings, recreated spatial experience, and illustrated processes of scientific work. We call this the story of a lab. Thus, the viewers will walk in and out of different experiences, which will continuously connect them to different forms of nature-culture relationships; to be able to redefine the Lab Culture with their own experiences.

This project was developed in collaboration with the Museum & Field Studies Facility at NCBS, Bengaluru.

The exhibition curation takes off from understanding and interpreting the scientific contents of all participating labs i.e. Prof. Bhalla’s lab, Dr. Ravi’s lab and Dr. Guha’s lab, housed under NCBS and inStem respectively. The common themes which could be identified across the work of these labs were modularity, scalability and plasticity, apart from their ongoing scientific inquiries. The emergent scientific narrative establishes the need for community building between different cellular units/groups and discovers the possible impacts of sharing resources or delegating roles for efficient functioning.

The cultural narrative thus borrows from these ideas and then looks at the concept of ‘laboratory’ under the microscope, limiting the discourse to labs at NCBS campus. Does laboratory define the socio-cultural fabric of this ecosystem? How has the lab evolved over time? How does one understand the laboratory as a unit of measure for the emerging cluster of science institutions in this campus? These questions are not fully answered but an attempt is made to articulate diverse voices, retrieved from archival interpretation, study of published material, and a few interviews with key people.

In conclusion, this short exchange between the science, history, space and technology, raises questions about scalability of a culture, and identifies with the need for cultural evolution, rather than succumbing to any form of rigid value systems. This exhibition is thus, an experiment in itself, spanning across concepts of emergence, existence and experiences.