Alumni AudioLab is a monthly podcast series where alumni of the OeAD talk about themselves and their research. The OeAD brings together researchers from all over the world and from different fields of research who spent part of their research career in Austria – some of them have even stayed here. In the Alumni AudioLab they tell their stories, talk about their scientific ambitions, their motivations and their personal backgrounds. It is an open format for all those who are not only interested in science as such but also in the people behind it.
https://oead.at/en/to-austria/alumni/audiolab
AAL_25_Alumni AudioLab with Tanushree Gupta
As a child, Tanushree Gupta from India found paintings by her mother that were in poor condition. She was enthusiastic about restoring them. Today she is an art conservator. She has maintained her enthusiasm and joy in dealing with paintings and other art objects and has now proven her skills as a conservator and researcher with a doctoral degree.
Her most recent project was a new storage concept for the Napier Museum in Kerala, southern India. High humidity and temperatures make it difficult for the art objects to be stored there. She redesigned the storage with an international team of researchers and restored existing damage to artworks such as mold.
"Every object is a new project," she says in this podcast episode, because you cannot close from one object to another one. You always start at zero with a comprehensive analysis before any restoration can be done. That can take up to a month.
One particularly important project to her was the recent re-restoration of her mother's paintings. Because asked about any mistakes, Tanushree explains with a laugh that those were the one objects where she did pretty much everything wrong. Today she knows better.
Tanushree Gupta has been a recurring OeAD scholarship holder since 2011 in the funding programs Ernst Mach worldwide and technology grants East / Central and South Asia (today Ernst Mach Eurasia-Pacific Uninet).