Sana Nasir’s illustration titled The Inside-Out Place.
Delhi-based artist Pakhi Sen has spent a large part of her life in the coastal landscape of Goa, in a home with ceramic tiles, surrounded with forests, where light filtered through glass panels to create patterns. She remembers reading in her large verandah with the music of American jazz saxophonist John Coltrane playing in her head. In her work titled The Old Pereira House, she paints two images of Goa — one being what she imagines a perfect Goan house to be, and the other based on her recollections, a composition with negative colours and blurred boundaries.
Sen is one of the 12 artists who have explored the “idea of home” in the first physical exhibition, titled “Home”, organised by The Pind Collective, an online collaborative platform that brings together artists from India and Pakistan, to share art, poetry, movies, illustrations and stories on common themes. “Initially, we connected with contemporaries in India whose work we like and respect. We then connected with artists in Pakistan through friends,” says Avani Tandon Vieira. The 22-year-old writer co-founded the collective with filmmaker Ansh Ranvir Vohra in July 2016.
While Vieira looks after the text, Vohra takes care of the visuals and collaborates with artists. His movie, Fazal Ka Bangla, is also being screened at the exhibition in Delhi, where he has shared memories of the Partition narrated by his maternal grandmother, Nirmal Chawla, who migrated from Pakistan to India in 1947. “We also asked artists to create works in response to what others had done,” says Vohra, 24. In response to his movie, Sana Nasir, a Pakistani artist, has created an illustration titled The Inside-Out Place, that compares Chawla’s journey to India with her own grandmother’s journey to Pakistan. Similarly, Delhi-based poet Sthira Bhattacharya has responded to Sen’s painting with a poem, Surrounded, where she has explored spaces that lie between home and the unknown — lush vegetation, unweeded gardens, rubble and ant hills.
Fawad Khan, a dastango in Pakistan, has filmed himself narrating a short story, Haveli, written by Urdu humourist, Mushtaq Ahmed Yusufi, where Qibla, a short-tempered, well-built man, who thought everyone else is beneath him, had to leave his haveli in Kanpur after Partition. Similarly, in Dairy of a Vagabond/Jis Desh Main Ganga Behti Hai, Karachi-based historian Sarah Hashmi, has sketched structures of homes left behind in India by refugees to Pakistan.
“The idea of the project came up after I visited Lahore for a debate competition in 2013, and realised how culturally similar both the countries are,” says Vieira. The postgraduate in English literature from the University of Oxford teaches Young India Fellowship students at Ashoka University. “One year ago we didn’t really think that we would be holding a physical exhibition, and we don’t know where this project would be a year later,” says Vohra, who will soon relocate to New York for a filmmaking fellowship by Uniondocs Collaborative Studio. The Delhi-based duo, meanwhile, is also looking forward to an online exhibition based on “resistance”. The line-up of artists will be revealed soon.
The exhibition ends today at Khoj Studios, S-17, Khirkee Extension
