Arpita Akhanda: Entering a Field of Signs
(Excerpt from exhibition essay by Natasha Ginwala, 2026)
Memory is a catchment area of a riverine geography with its winding tributaries ferrying people, social territories, and enduring ideas across time-spaces. Arpita Akhanda has been composing public and intimate encounters via mnemonic landscapes as creative acts that address familial migration, restitute somatic forms of remembrance, and counter erasure of vulnerable archives. She connects with historiographies of the subcontinent's partition through the prismatic space of home, ancestral stories and poem-songs of Bengal, as well as photographic repositories that become animated through her sensorial aesthetics of 'restaging'. In her practice, the living body is a field of resistance and citation in bordered time and fragmented geography. As a performer and forager of image worlds, Akhanda draws on this innate capacity of the body, conjoining and inventing everyday gestures of repair, opacity, and refuge.
The artist notes, "I am interested in understanding how we remember or want to remember, access, and retrieve memories, and what happens when a memory is erased, forgotten, or unavailable." In her elaborate paper weavings, kinetic sculpture, performance and video works, there is a constant return to vernacular visual corpora from family albums, telegrams, letters, travelogues, stamps and heirlooms carried from one generation to the next. Through a subjective lens centering fissured and embodied pasts, she invites us into a cosmology of difference, separation and mutuality. As a bricoleur, Akhanda embraces rupture as a vital ingredient of planetary systems. It is through cracks, knots and ciphers as unstable interfaces that new formations ultimately emerge as a relational horizon. The sentience at work in all of this, reminds one of Jane Bennett's description of a vibrant world in which all things, whether living or not, manufactured or raw, from animals, ideas, to ecosystems are "lively forces at work around and within us."
In the paper weaving series, Anemoia (2025) Akhanda elaborates from a leaf of a family album building a sepia tapestry, revisiting the form of her maternal grandfather who was from Faridpur and part of the Indian freedom movement. Encountering the original photograph years later while living in Belgium, the artist engages with clues and missing information within the frame. Having passed away before Akhanda's birth, like the young men in the visual, her grandfather, too remains a distant presence. Standing amidst tropical fauna, the portrait is transfigured into a woven grid introducing a third space through the vertical and horizontal axis. With the fauna turning into a repetitive pattern, the artist treats negative space as an assertion of the fuzziness of memory and how the human brain's plasticity at times compensates by fabulating scenes; filling in blanks between the real, forgotten and imagined. Like family albums erode over decades as the photo chemicals and humidity liquify the image, obscuring details into new blurred contours. In each variation of the image, Akhanda alters the weft from dense gold tones to a map of river systems. For her, (re)weaving is a non-linear mode of remembrance; it conjugates time-space into an axis of intimacies and estrangement.
Through the binary code system connecting the punched card technology of the jacquard loom to modern computing, we recognize weaving among the earliest human technologies which continues to influence human-machine interactions. Akhanda's woven installations engage these characteristics of a pictorial field as coded language. She fluidly graphs the physical manifestation of the grid into the digital terrain of pixels. In his essay 'Textility of Making' Tim Ingold describes artists as itinerant wayfarers, as they improvise to meld with the world, charting "lines of drift'' with different loops, knots, speeds, movements, gestures, and sonorities. In her new series for this exhibition, Carry, Borrow, Sow (2026) these 'lines of drift' converge into the motif of a boat that is a kind of junction and compass indicating the cardinal directions and windward currents. The artist notes how this imaginative boat-bridge carries the elements of land, water and air while journeying with the moon phases. In this dream carrier, we are buoyed in night sky and held steadfast through magnetic fields.
