Mumbai art show curated by Anish Gawande questions how we perceive history, memory

For Anish Gawande Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali is more than just an inspiration he is a companion who has accompanied him across countries and contexts Gawandersquos fascination with the poet led him to start the Dara Shikoh Fellowship in the last decadeGawande is taking his love for Alirsquos work a step further by curating lsquoEvent Memory Metaphorrsquo at Mumbairsquos TARQ Art Gallery inspired by Alirsquos poem lsquoFarewellrsquo The exhibition is a part of Art Night Thursday and starts on July 14It will showcase artworks by Areez Katki Garima Gupta Muzzumil Ruheel Parag Tandel Philippe Calia Saju Kunhan Sameer Kulavoor and Saubiya Chasmawala who are all a part of the galleryrsquos archivesMidDay Online spoke to Gawande to understand his vision for the showHere are the edited excerptsWhat was it about Agha Shahid Alirsquos poem lsquoFarewellrsquo that inspired you to curate this showShahids poem is inspired by the intricate intertwining of memory and history Staged as a letter from a Kashmiri Muslim to a Kashmiri Pandit the poem asks probing questions about how if at all reconciliation is possible after years of mistrust and polarisation ldquoYour history keeps getting in my way of my memoryrdquo writes Shahid Should we turn to the past to heal the wounds of the present Or do we need to reimagine new futures by turning to history as a site of fragmentation of confusion a space that does not provide easy answers For me these are the questions Shahid raises in his poetry mdash and in their own way the artists in lsquoEvent Memory Metaphorrsquo seek to answer themIs Aga Shahid Ali among your favourite poets What aspect of his work do you think makes him relevant todayI think Ive treated Shahid as a friend a companion who has accompanied me across countries and contexts Even though he passed away far before I ever read him hes been an indelible presence in my work for the better part of the past decade My own work starting the Dara Shikoh Fellowship cultivating a relationship with Kashmir has been driven by Shahids poetry At a time when we are witnessing the spectacular insidious rise of polarisation with hatred becoming the common currency for creating divides between communities Shahids poetry provides a mirror for us to understand the monsters we have become He does not provide easy answers but pushes his reader to think beyond simple binaries to interrogate the structures fuelling these divides Thats also what the show aspires to doWhat attracted you about these eight artistsFor me the critical framework that brings these works together is Shahid Amins book lsquoEvent Memory Metaphorrsquo Thats also where the exhibition draws its title from Amin uses oral histories of Chauri Chaura to piece apart the fragility of official narratives of the foundational stories we tell ourselves in building imagined communities He offers the framework of a recalcitrant event a moment within the archive that refuses these narratives that fragments such a uniform understanding This show is fundamentally an archival intervention that takes Amins provocation to turn to TARQs own archivesAlso read Mumbai theatre talk Actor Asmit Patharersquos play lsquoUs amp Themrsquo attempts to deconstruct nationalismHave these works been displayed beforeThe works on display in the show have all been displayed before in very different contexts Here they come together to make you ask why do we turn to the past In what ways do we see the archive as a space for recovering power for understanding ourselves better And what are the dangers of such an archival turnWhich of these eight artistsrsquo works do you relate to the mostThats a difficult question Ive always loved Muzzumil Ruheel and Saubiya Chasmawalas works so Im delighted to be able to exhibit them But the greatest find has been Areez Katki I absolutely adore his work because he weaves together literally and metaphorically narratives from the past as a form of a reconfiguration of memory history and sexuality Mumbai queerness and nostalgia all come together in a heady mixture that really speaks to meWhat role do you think archives play in our lives especially given the transformation from the physical to digitalTheres a flawed assumption that the lives we lead today the memories we create and put out into the world today are permanent and imperishable The digital world offers us a false reassurance of permanence We marvel at how little we know of civilisations gone by like Harappa and MohenjoDaro We look at fragments of pottery with a mix of awe and condescension we see them as relics from a different era But how can we understand the fragility of the traces we are currently leaving behind What happens if tomorrow social media is shut down Vast amounts of digital debris disappears every day without a whisper Hundreds of years from now will much more be known of the lives we led despite our frantic obsession with archiving keeping records or despite our primal desire to maintain a footprintAnish Gawande takes inspiration from Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Alirsquos work lsquoFarewellrsquo for this exhibition Photo Courtesy TARQ Art GalleryHow important do you think art that explores the past through a different perspective is mdash especially for subjects such as colonisation personal history and sexuality mdash which the show delves intoI maintain an ambiguous relationship with the power of the past to hold answers for the future or indeed the present Some of the artists in the show like Garima Gupta turn to the colonial archive as a site of reclaiming agency Others like Saju Kunhan see personal archives as a site for recovering personal historiesThis turn to the past must be accompanied by a critical interrogation of the very process of archiving In the show Philippe Calia turns to satellite imagery of rare mineral deposits which power the physical infrastructure that allows the digital world to come alive Archiving remains a colonial form an extractive process mdash even in its invisibilised contemporary form Can a form so deeply imbricated in exploitative methods ever hold the possibility of redemption of emancipation Like with Shahids poem there are no easy answersEvery artistrsquos work touches upon a different subject with the central theme as memory What is your perception of memory and did it change after going through these artworksMemory is powerful and capacious Understanding memory engaging with it is crucial to reimagine history I am increasingly uncomfortable with the truth claims of history of the archive Of the possibility of a single linear narrative Thats why I turn to memory not as oppositional to history but as integral to the construction of history Unlike history memory embraces contradictions and is comfortable with fragmentation confusion and rupture Im drawn to Parag Tandels work which intersperses memory with history to create fantastical sculptures that see the past as a site of vivid imagination rather than stale factfinding He comes from a Koli background and responds to the increasing precarity of the continued existence of the Koli community in Mumbai as a result of forced migration climate change and infrapoliticsEven in the face of these challenges however he doesnt feel the need to establish a uniform picture of what Koli identity is Preserving history providing a home to memory does not require the creation of monolithic understandings of the past Today in the face of violence at a time when history is being rewritten we need to resist the urge to replace one grand narrative with another We need to rupture the past blow up the idea of History with a capital H and embrace multiple histories Thats what the show has taught meIndiarsquos social fabric hitherto known for its plurality and tolerance seems to have stretched thin How do you see art shaping public opinion in the futureIm deeply troubled by the belief that archiving our present is the most important task of the day Thats reflected in the archival turn in contemporary art The works in the show respond to that unease Sameer Kulavoors JCB paired with his Potato Wedges for example shows the futility of pulling out our phone cameras to record every new form of violence every new atrocity Has documenting acts of oppression prevented them from continuing to take place We keep saying sab yaad rakha jaayega but what is the point of this yaad rakhna The instances we record today will become the archives of the future But what promise of justice can those archives hold Critical theorist Anjali Arondekars framing of archival hermeneutics explores how the ways in which we ask questions of the past fundamentally shapes the answers we can receive The archive is a colonial construction the turn to the archive is an extractive process Can it be reclaimed Maybe And art is one of the most powerful methods for its reclamation But not without an understanding of its history of its politicsAt TARQ Art Gallery ColabaWhen July 14 to September 24