LAHORE: An exhibition of artworks by Indian artist Pritika Chowdhry opened at Rohtas 2 Art Gallery on Monday.
The exhibition, Remembering the Crooked Line, is an intensive investigation of borders and cartography as technologies of colonization, nation-building and ethnic divisions.
Ms Chowdhry says ‘Remembering the Crooked Line project’ is the third in a series of installations that deals with partitions.
“My starting point for the series was intensive research in the history of the partition of India in 1947, and the ethnic violence that erupted in the South Asian subcontinent as a result of this watershed event,” she said at the exhibition.
“In the making of these works and doing further research, I realised that there are multiple histories of partitions. In fact, I found that partitioning communities and nations along ethnic lines is a recurring motif in geopolitical conflicts of the 20th century. And the project seeks to make transnational connections between seemingly disparate geopolitical histories.”
About her artworks, she said the multi-part installation functioned as an archive that made transnational connections between nations partitioned in the 20th century.
The artist said, “I think of maps as the skin of the nation. By extracting real and fictionalised cartographic fragments of the border lines of each of the above-mentioned countries, and grafting them onto garments, board games, and kites.
The installation on display consists of five parts. The first four parts are of sculptural renditions of playing ring-a-ring-a-roses, flying kites, playing a game of Parcheesi, and playing a game of chess. In the exhibition, these games are cross-cultural motifs that highlight commonalities between the portioned nations, and allow the viewer to engage with large transnational histories from a personal and individual location.
The fifth part of the installation is a multi-layered soundscape that further mines the charged tensions between the intimate and the national. The primary layer of the soundscape is of a mother and her two daughters’ alternately singing the “Ring-a-ring-a-roses” rhyme. There is a stark contrast between the joyful innocence of the young girls’ singing and the somber gravity of the grown woman’s voice.
In the distant background, historic independence speeches by the first heads of the states of India, Pakistan, Israel, and the Irish Republic can be heard. The speeches have been laid as background on the primary track, along with national anthems of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Israel, and Ireland.
The media used in the exhibition include raw silk, tea-dyed Khadi cotton, wire, wax, digital prints on Indian dupioni silk, marker, pens, wood and other such material.
The exhibition will continue till Jan 14.
The artist lives in the US and has done a masters in visual culture and gender studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and another masters in fine arts in studio art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has a BS in fine arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The title of the exhibition is inspired by a novel titled “The Crooked Line” by Ismat Chughtai, a Muslim feminist writer from India.
This epic novel, which was penned in the late 1940s, traces the tumultuous life of a Muslim Indian woman from childhood through adolescence to adulthood. The novel makes allegorical connections between the common histories of British colonization that Ireland and India share. As a post-colonial text, it is significant in bridging the histories of two former colonies of Britain.
