LOC (Line of Control):

The story of the subcontinent’s Partition, is a subject commonly shared, across disciplines, by many artists, writers, film-makers, journalists and historians on both sides of the crooked line. The accounts of this imposed geographic division, after more than sixty years, still continues to hold a sense of immediacy. This very split that triggered sectarian hatred and bloodletting, causing profound physical, social and emotional scars, is also the subject of Pritika Chowdhry’s ‘Remembering the Crooked Line’ on display at Rohtas 2 art gallery, from January 2^nd to 14^th

Chowdhry is an Indian artist, curator, scholar, and educator who has lived in the US since 1999 and currently visiting Lahore for research on monuments and historical documents for, possibly, a continuation of her critical investigation of the politics of identity/ nation-building.

What is interesting is that much of this retelling of history of the Partition is done by people situated/schooled in the West, as argued by Dorothy Barenscott, in This is our Holocaust: Question of Partition Trauma. She writes that “the interest in witnessing, memory, trauma, subjectivity and history has come to characterize a new direction in Partition historiography, which has a direct and theoretically informed connection to the Holocaust; a distinctly western preoccupation”. How their diasporic status informs and shapes their work, on this subject, is worth investigating.

In any case, at the core of the subject is the analysis of storytelling and storymaking. Storytelling for survival perhaps, just like Scheherazade of Arabian Nights, to either prevent or allow the existence of a no man’s land, an ambiguous site, in-betweeness, a place of regenerative promise.

In an attempt to articulate this understanding of borders, Chowdhry’s work is an unavoidable situation of constructing, breaking down, reconstructing, telling and retelling the imaginary relationship between tangible and intangible or fact and fiction. She writes: “I think of maps as the skin of the nation. By extracting real and fictionalized cartographic fragments of the border lines of each of the above-mentioned countries (India, Palestine, Ireland, and Cyprus - former British colonies), and grafting them onto garments, board games, and kites, I attempt to give material form to the skin of the nation. While the physical human body is made elusive in this project, its absence is alluded to by several corporeal references. In each of these objects, the maps have been manifested on materials which have been manipulated to feel like skin. This installation is comprised of five parts. The first four consist of sculptural renditions of playing Ring-a-ring-a- roses, flying kites, playing a game of Parcheesi, and playing a game of chess. Each of these activities is played in the above-mentioned countries as per local customs. In this project, these games are cross-cultural motifs that highlight between these nations, and allow the viewer to engage with large transnational histories from a personal and individual location”. 

Pritika Chowdhry

Ring-a-Ring-a-Roses, part I

Tassar and raw silk, goddess hair, hand embroidered, wax.

Set of six vests (kurtis).

2009

Pritika Chowhdry

The Shadow Lines

Handmade flax and abaca paper, pig and cow guts, surgical suture, thread, wax, walnut ink.

Set of twelve kites.

2009

Lines of Control

Digital prints on Indian dupioni silk, conte crayons, marker pens, wood.

2009

Using a variety of mediums (such as; raw silk, hair, Khadi cotton, wire, wax, embroidery, surgical suture, thread, e.t.c) Chowdhry has utilized these objects (chess board, Parcheesi board, kites, bodices) for their objective reality, as a substitute for human presence and for an interactive/physical engagement with the viewer, but I don’t know if they are anything more than surfaces for markmaking. Perhaps the tortured/burnt/sutured skins could have been sealed away as flat surfaces, or perhaps they work better as suspended/displaced objects, viewed against the backdrop of human bodies strolling in the gallery. The game of chess is perhaps too direct or rather illustrative or may be it helps elicits a direct response. Perhaps it only presents the viewer with a range of contemporary issues with mapmaking or maybe there is a fine balance between analyzing both the psychic spaces (fact and fiction) objectively and asking for a redefinition of these imaginary lines with which we inscribe and divide. Or perhaps it’s a psychic conflict within the cartographic pursuits itself.