Arpita Akhanda’s practice is firmly rooted in research and develops interdisciplinary lines of enquiry on the meaning of body, belonging, home and migration. Akhanda creates nuanced, politically and socially charged, multi-dimensional works that raise pertinent questions about colonial and post-colonial history for a generation that has only known this through handed-down memories or written texts.
Her ongoing research around the history of partition and inter-generational pain is explored across mediums; Akhanda constructs relationships between the past/memory and the present through her staged photographs, paper weavings, drawings, writings, performances and videos. In addition, she offers significant social commentary by taking on various roles, such as that of a photo documenter, a mender/weaver, an empathetic viewer, and sometimes even a silent, forgotten protagonist from the past.
In Akhanda’s practice, the performative and performance ebb and flow into each other. She has embraced performance as a method for scrutinising and revisiting institutional and personal histories, memories and archives encompassing a myriad of colonial and post-colonial recollections. These include her family’s collection of poems, photographs, documents, letters, telegrams, postcards, oral histories, and travelogues, meticulously preserved by her grandparents and parents since the partition of India. These archival treasures have significantly influenced her comprehension of India’s independence and partition, shaping her perspective on their enduring impact on the present. Akhanda’s artistic practice responds to the imperative to decolonise and reinterpret these memories.
