© Sid White-Jones - ‘Snow’ - Sohrab Hura (Instillation View).
‘Homelands - Art from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan’, at Kettles Yard, Cambridge is an exhibition curated by Devika Singh with Amy Tobin and Grace Storey, the show features works of photography, sculpture, painting, performance and film by artists including; Bani Abidi, Desmond Lazaro, Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi, Munem Wasif, Nikhil Chopra, Seher Shah, Shilpa Gupta, Sohrab Hura, Yasmin Jahan Nupur & Zarina Hashmi.
The exhibition engages with displacement and the transitory notion of home in a region marked by the repercussions of the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, and the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, as well as by contemporary migration. The artists explore intimate and political histories, often contesting borders, questioning common pasts and imagining new futures.’
© Sid White-Jones - ‘Untitled’ (Instillation View) - Shilpa Gupta.
© Sid White-Jones - ‘Rouge’ (Cut Section) - Nikhil Chopra.
Twenty-seven framed prints from Sohrab Hura’s series ‘Snow’ were just one of the artworks on show. The photographic project focused on the residents of Kashmir, a region within which a conflict still exists to this day, due to the regions contested ownership. The series aims to present a side of the region that goes usually unrepresented, showing the normalities and simplicities of everyday life through a varied subject matter.
© Sid White-Jones - ‘Mangoes’ (Cut Section) - Bani Abidi.
© Sid White-Jones - ‘Argument from Silence’ (Cut Section) - Seher Shah.
Seher Shah’s series of Photogravure’s ‘Argument from Silence', transform imagery of ancient Gandharan sculptures by applying delicately drawn overlays to the photo-mechanical prints in order to question what these, and other ancient objects can still teach to contemporary audiences today. Within the show Shah explores ideas of ownership, as Sohrab Hura also does. These physical sculptures have also resulted in disputes, in this case at the time of Partition, between India and Pakistan.
© Sid White-Jones - ‘Homelands - Art from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan’ (Instillation View).
Also on show was Bani Abidi’s double-channel video installation, ‘The News’. The two videos are fake news items presented as two real television broadcasts reporting of the same story. One story is told from the Indian side of the International Border, and the other from the Pakistani side.
‘Presented on 2 monitor screens, a Pakistani and an Indian news presenter relate separate versions of the same news event. The script is an adaptation from a common joke about an Indian and a Pakistani. Adapted to sound like a news event, the joke is a banal slapstick display of superiority. The language used in the video is the Sanskritised Hindi of official Indian jargon and the Persianised Urdu of the Pakistani state, a comment on the state’s exclusivist policies of altering language in its effort to construct a separate identity.’