Arpita Akhanda
I work across mediums that include paper weavings, photography, performance, installations, drawings, and video pieces.
Born into a family with the traumatic memory of displacement and forced migration during the Partition of 1947, my work deals with the relationship between our present and past trauma through exploring inter-generational memories/knowledge systems, inherited family archives, and search for a home. Calling my body a "memory collector" or post-memorial site of the past is mediated not by recall but by recreation, imaginative investment, and projection. I am interested to understand how body preserves and transmits colonial and postcolonial recollections over generations.
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Through my work, which uses photo performance/performance, archival photographs and maps, and borrowed/shared memories, I construct the relationship between time and place, movement and settlement, and self and the geo-body.
I am deeply interested in personal histories, which get diluted when placed next to the more institutional forms of narrative. It struggles to find a voice, a paragraph, or any recognition. I want my practice to become a platform to bring personal and institutional memory together, on the same footing to understand the methods of history/memory-making.
I adopted performance as a process to excavate, investigate, and revisit - Institutional and personal history/memories. Archives of the colonial and post-colonial memories in the form of poems, photographs, written documents, letters, telegrams, postcards, oral histories, and travelogues which my grandparents and parents preserved, shaped my understanding of independence/partition of our country and how it affected our present. My practice emerges out of the need to de-colonize these memories.
By revisiting the past/memories through my performances and performance-based practice I try to understand, dissect, comprehend, analyze, and critically consider the politics of sociopolitical identity as it is defined, molded, or discarded by history.
I explore paper weaving as a process to weave the warp of memories with the weft of present situations to create a fabric that questions identity and existence. And the two layers, containing the past and the present, get interwoven to construct a pixelated, broken, hidden, dissected, and blurred visual language. I see this language as a metaphor to speak for the forgotten and lost narratives.