‘Farewell’—and the idea of the archive
Live MintAgha Shahid Ali’s poems on memory, loss and belonging have been viewed through both a personal and political lens over the past couple of years. Titled Event, Memory, Metaphor, the show has been curated by Anish Gawande, the director of the Dara Shikoh Fellowship in India who focuses on the “global creative dialogue around Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh”, and curator of Pink List India, an “archive” of politicians supporting LGBTQ+ rights. At a time when the turn to history is so politicised and contested—with names of roads being changed, history in textbooks being modified—Shahid Ali’s work perhaps becomes all the more important. Gawande’s work has always examined the contested terrains of language, sexuality and history in South Asia and Francophone West Africa. “The show brings together the work I have been doing on the politics of memory, which is so integral to the politics of identity today, and puts it in conversation with art practices that reconfigure, reimagine and rework our relationship with the past.” He highlights the impermanence of history, and, hence, the impermanence of the archive—what we believe to be true might be erased tomorrow.
History of this topic
‘Cities in Fiction’ public digital archive documents places from literature to serve as memory markers
The HinduDiscover Related
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