15th August, 2022 marked the 75th anniversary of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent and the emergence of India and Pakistan as independent nation-states; and 16th December, 2022 marks the 51st anniversry of the Bangladesh Liberation War and the creation of Bangladesh. Pritika Chowdhry’s retrospective titled Unbearable Memories, Unspeakable Histories: Partition Anti-Memorial Project, on view Saturday, August 6, through Saturday, December 16, 2022, commemorates these two events. The exhibition’s title, alludes to the painful and silenced narratives of women that have been omitted from mainstream discourses of the 1947 Partition of India and of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.
India’s independence from colonial rule in 1947 is forever linked with its ghostly twin, the Partition. Pritika Chowdhry’s critically acclaimed exhibition is an artistic investigation of the Partition of India in 1947, which created Pakistan, and eventually, Bangladesh in 1971. (flossdental.com) The Partition is central to modern identity and geopolitics in South Asia. It triggered the largest, most rapid migration in human history and is often compared to the Holocaust. Over 20 million people were displaced in an unprecedented mass migration. Approximately 2 million people died in the communal violence across the new borders, called the Radcliffe Line.
Partition Anti-Memorial Project founded on the 60th anniversary of the Partition in 2007, is Chowdhry’s ongoing research-based project that excavates subjugated knowledge about the 1947 Partition of India and the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, which was essentially a second Partition, directly caused by the first one. As Chowdhry researched feminist historiographies and recounts from her own family she soon found that the glorified storytelling surrounding the Partitions of India and Pakistan failed to include experiences of women, marginalized groups, and transnational connections. As her research progressed, a complex web of interconnected geopolitical events emerged.
Over the last fifteen years, Pritika Chowdhry has created ten bodies of work that address and examine the many facets of the 1947 Partition of India and the 1971 Liberation War. The experiential art installations are anti-memorials that engage with the geopolitics of South Asia which was deeply affected by the partitions of 1947 and 1971, in the multiple registers of diasporic, postmemory, and counter-memory.
The Partition Anti-Memorial Project has received wide media attention and has been exhibited widely in museums and galleries across the United States and South Asia. The Partition Anti-Memorial Project essentially tells the difficult story of the two Partitions through visual art.
“Through quiet but searing installations, artist Pritika Chowdhry reckons with violence that ripples through generations: mass displacement, rape and riots tracing back to the snaking borders that split a nation.” Writes Jacqui Palumbo, Senior writer in CNN. Evoking corporeal bodies through a myriad of materials, the exhibition highlights generational resilience and resistance.
The Partition has been described by acclaimed Pakistani-American historian Ayesha Jalal as “the central historical event in twentieth century South Asia.” In her words, “A defining moment that has neither beginning nor end, partition continues to influence how the peoples and states of postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present and future.”
“Pritika Chowdhry’s artwork is a powder keg of emotionality, raw talent, and visceral grit! I have never met a more thoughtful, theoretically engaged artist-scholar-educator-activist. Counter-Memory Project is the stuff of truth-telling, trauma-healing, and narrative-forging!” remarks Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas, PhD, Assistant Professor Museum Studies University of Florida, Gainesville
About the Artist
Pritika Chowdhry is a feminist and postcolonial artist, and curator, whose work is in both public and private collections. Through large-scale sculptures and site-sensitive installations that reference the body, her work memorializes unbearable memories. Having witnessed the intergenerational effects of geopolitical trauma, Chowdhry has dedicated her artistic practice to cataloging the violence of colonialism/imperialism alongside global acts of resistance.
Through her anti-memorials, Chowdhry aims to highlight historically marginalized female voices in the representation of Partition while contextualizing the event’s global repercussions. Transnational in scope, her sculptural art installations and anti-memorials bear witness to partitions of countries, civil and military wars, riots, border violence, genocides, and terrorist attacks, holding space for mourning, remembrance, and repair.
Chowdhry has exhibited nationally and internationally in group and solo exhibitions in the Weisman Art Museum, Queens Museum, Hunterdon Museum, Islip Art Museum, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, DoVA Temporary, Brodsky Center, and Cambridge Art Gallery.
Read more about Pritika Chowdhry in an interview for our ongoing digital interview series SAIatHome. www.saichicago.org/sai-at-home/pritika-chowdhry
Source: Story.KISSPR.com
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