Making Peace with Our Partitioned Selves

Not many are deluded enough to believe that art, even great art, can change the world. But in the wake of the Mumbai terrorist attacks in November, in the political tinderbox of the Subcontinent—with fundamentalist votes up for grabs, army budgets to be justified, the cost of the “war against terror” to be emphasized, newspapers to be sold and television viewers to be reached—there is an urgent need for a space for considered exploration of contentious issues. Visual art offers one such space.

The collateral damage of the Mumbai attacks has started spilling into the cultural sphere. An exhibition of three women artists from Pakistan in one of New Delhi’s largest galleries was postponed from its planned opening in mid-December 2008. Another prominent New Delhi gallerist, in collaboration with whom Green Cardamom Gallery (where I am the director) was planning to show a young Lahore-based artist, wants to hold off and “observe the mood” before committing to any firm dates for late 2009. India has advised its citizens not to travel to Pakistan.

In a well-observed article in the UK Guardian newspaper from December 13, the Indian writer Arundhati Roy argued that the Mumbai atrocities have to be seen in the context of Partition: “What we are experiencing now is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds…. The only way to contain (it would be naïve to say end) terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror.”

At Green Cardamom, we attempted to do some mirror-gazing of our own in January and February with the successive openings of our three-location (Dubai, Karachi, London) exhibition, “Lines of Control,” accompanied by a film program and a symposium. The first chapter of “Lines of Control” presented the work of 18 international artists who have dealt with India’s Partition and its cultural legacy as a productive space where memories are reconfigured, identities are fashioned, borders are created and patrolled, and traumas are commemorated, buried or dealt with—in short, where nations are made.           

While we sensed that the Mumbai attacks could jeopardize our plans, the first concrete hint came weeks later when our proposed venue in Karachi suddenly got cold feet over hosting Indian artists addressing Partition. An alternative was duly found, but with Indian airspace violations, Pakistani troops on the Afghan border redeployed eastwards and bellicose journalism on both sides of the border, the mood was hardly conducive to reasoned, critical discussion.

The exhibition had already been postponed once following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007 and its bloody aftermath, and we were reluctant to postpone the whole program again. So instead, we deferred the symposium, the exhibition’s most public element, conceived as a vehicle for students, artists and curious Karachiites to converse with artists from the Subcontinent whose work has explored Partition, including Amar Kanwar, Iftikhar Dadi, Nalini Malani, Raqs Media Collective and Rashid Rana. The irony is that our program to address Partition’s legacy was disrupted by that very legacy.

The bloodiest (more than one million dead) and most unsettling (an estimated eight to 15 million people displaced) partition on record, the 1947 Partition remains an event for the world to consider. The past ten years have seen the Subcontinent’s visual artists at their most productive in making sense of the present by engaging with the past. In this endeavor, they are not entertainers of our visual impulse but rather creators of understanding. Alongside monumental solo engagements like Amar Kanwar’s series of films—most notably A Season Outside (1997), A Night of Prophecy (2004) and The Lightning Testimonies (2007)—and Nalini Malani’s new-media installation, Remembering Toba Tek Singh (1997), there is a growing trend towards collaboration and exchange, nurtured by the residency programs of Khoj, Vasl and Britto, the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi nodes, respectively, in the international Triangle Arts Trust. The landmark “Mappings” exhibition at New Delhi’s Eicher Gallery in 1997, curated by Khoj co-founder Pooja Sood, and the Aar Paar projects of artistic exchange initiated by Karachi-based Huma Mulji and Mumbai-based Shilpa Gupta in 1999 come out of that same impulse. The more recent Indian-Pakistani artist couples—Sarnath Banerjee and Bani Abidi, Anup Matthew Thomas and Marium Sohail, and Sumedh Rajendran and Masooma Syed—are ultimate border-crossings that will not be put off by a mere travel advisory. The first steps towards coexistence in our partitioned times have already been taken.

If partitions make nations, visual art can articulate the choices that have to be made in the process. This conversation is an important one. For the challenge of living with partitions is not
only a South Asian one. It is relevant wherever lines are drawn by retreating colonialists or decaying empires. If Kosovo and South Ossettia’s newly declared but contested independence are not proof enough, consider the political crisis that threatens to divide Belgium, the bombing of Gaza, Iraq’s feuding Sunnis and Shiites and the war-torn Western Sahara.

Not many are deluded enough to believe that art, even great art, can change the world. But in the wake of the Mumbai terrorist attacks in November, in the political tinderbox of the Subcontinent—with fundamentalist votes up for grabs, army budgets to be justified, the cost of the “war against terror” to be emphasized, newspapers to be sold and television viewers to be reached—there is an urgent need for a space for considered exploration of contentious issues. Visual art offers one such space.

The collateral damage of the Mumbai attacks has started spilling into the cultural sphere. An exhibition of three women artists from Pakistan in one of New Delhi’s largest galleries was postponed from its planned opening in mid-December 2008. Another prominent New Delhi gallerist, in collaboration with whom Green Cardamom Gallery (where I am the director) was planning to show a young Lahore-based artist, wants to hold off and “observe the mood” before committing to any firm dates for late 2009. India has advised its citizens not to travel to Pakistan.

In a well-observed article in the UK Guardian newspaper from December 13, the Indian writer Arundhati Roy argued that the Mumbai atrocities have to be seen in the context of Partition: “What we are experiencing now is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds…. The only way to contain (it would be naïve to say end) terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror.”

At Green Cardamom, we attempted to do some mirror-gazing of our own in January and February with the successive openings of our three-location (Dubai, Karachi, London) exhibition, “Lines of Control,” accompanied by a film program and a symposium. The first chapter of “Lines of Control” presented the work of 18 international artists who have dealt with India’s Partition and its cultural legacy as a productive space where memories are reconfigured, identities are fashioned, borders are created and patrolled, and traumas are commemorated, buried or dealt with—in short, where nations are made.           

While we sensed that the Mumbai attacks could jeopardize our plans, the first concrete hint came weeks later when our proposed venue in Karachi suddenly got cold feet over hosting Indian artists addressing Partition. An alternative was duly found, but with Indian airspace violations, Pakistani troops on the Afghan border redeployed eastwards and bellicose journalism on both sides of the border, the mood was hardly conducive to reasoned, critical discussion.

The exhibition had already been postponed once following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007 and its bloody aftermath, and we were reluctant to postpone the whole program again. So instead, we deferred the symposium, the exhibition’s most public element, conceived as a vehicle for students, artists and curious Karachiites to converse with artists from the Subcontinent whose work has explored Partition, including Amar Kanwar, Iftikhar Dadi, Nalini Malani, Raqs Media Collective and Rashid Rana. The irony is that our program to address Partition’s legacy was disrupted by that very legacy.

The bloodiest (more than one million dead) and most unsettling (an estimated eight to 15 million people displaced) partition on record, the 1947 Partition remains an event for the world to consider. The past ten years have seen the Subcontinent’s visual artists at their most productive in making sense of the present by engaging with the past. In this endeavor, they are not entertainers of our visual impulse but rather creators of understanding. Alongside monumental solo engagements like Amar Kanwar’s series of films—most notably A Season Outside (1997), A Night of Prophecy (2004) and The Lightning Testimonies (2007)—and Nalini Malani’s new-media installation, Remembering Toba Tek Singh (1997), there is a growing trend towards collaboration and exchange, nurtured by the residency programs of Khoj, Vasl and Britto, the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi nodes, respectively, in the international Triangle Arts Trust. The landmark “Mappings” exhibition at New Delhi’s Eicher Gallery in 1997, curated by Khoj co-founder Pooja Sood, and the Aar Paar projects of artistic exchange initiated by Karachi-based Huma Mulji and Mumbai-based Shilpa Gupta in 1999 come out of that same impulse. The more recent Indian-Pakistani artist couples—Sarnath Banerjee and Bani Abidi, Anup Matthew Thomas and Marium Sohail, and Sumedh Rajendran and Masooma Syed—are ultimate border-crossings that will not be put off by a mere travel advisory. The first steps towards coexistence in our partitioned times have already been taken.

If partitions make nations, visual art can articulate the choices that have to be made in the process. This conversation is an important one. For the challenge of living with partitions is not only a South Asian one. It is relevant wherever lines are drawn by retreating colonialists or decaying empires. If Kosovo and South Ossettia’s newly declared but contested independence are not proof enough, consider the political crisis that threatens to divide Belgium, the bombing of Gaza, Iraq’s feuding Sunnis and Shiites and the war-torn Western Sahara.