Arpita Akhanda reconstructs memories in her first major solo art show
Arpita Akhanda draws on the lingering echo of her family’s displacement after the Partition of Bengal, treating memory as a living body that gathers photographs, textiles and oral histories. Born in Cuttack and now based in Santiniketan, she traces the routes of her grandparents from Comilla, Barishal and Faridpur to Odisha, using personal recollection to illuminate broader histories of movement and loss.
Her first major solo, Under the Moon Across Many Waters, on view at Emami Art, Kolkata, expands this inquiry through paper weaving, jacquard tapestries, performance, drawing and kinetic installations. Over two years the artist has woven archival photographs into fragmented textiles, allowing the image to be cut, re‑stitched and set into motion, while video and live actions echo the same motifs.
Repetition becomes a methodological tool for Akhanda: each new layer both preserves and obscures, highlighting how archives are selective and often gendered. By juxtaposing her grandfather’s camera‑filled diary with her grandmother’s oral and textile memories, she questions what counts as historical evidence and whose stories survive.
The work Carry, Borrow and Sow, a centerpiece of the show, visualises memory as something that travels, transforms and takes root. Through the act of carrying, borrowing and sowing archival fragments, Akhanda suggests that the past is not a static record but a body‑bound archive that continues to grow in the present.