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.
Working across paper weaving, photography, performance, installation, and video, Akhanda's practice conceptualizes the body as a "memory collector", a repository of lived experience and a site for post-memorial reconstruction. Born into a family of artists who migrated from Bangladesh during the 1947 Partition of India, moving through various regions before settling in Odisha, India, she explores the intricate relationship between contemporary life and inherited trauma. She navigates this terrain through intergenerational memories, family archives, and the elusive quest for home.
Akhanda’s performance practice serves as the foundation for all her works -- be it as a standalone medium or the conceptual base for her weavings and videos. She utilises paper weaving as a metaphorical process, intertwining the warp of past with the weft of the present and vice versa to interrogate identity. The resulting visual language -- fragmented, pixelated, and obscured -- serves as a metaphor for lost narratives as she revisits institutional and personal histories, memories and archives 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.
Through these methods, she explores how memory travels in the body, the archive, the water and the land: what is kept, what is rebuilt, what fades, and what resurfaces through the ongoing act of remembering. Arpita Akhanda’s artistic practice responds to the imperative to decolonise and reinterpret these memories.
