Event, Memory, Metaphor curated by Anish Gawande

About

TARQ is delighted to present Event, Memory, Metaphor, curated by Anish Gawande, opening on July 14th2022 for Art Night Thursday. Inspired by Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali’s poem “Farewell,” the show explores the intricate intertwining of memory and history to ask fundamental questions about how — and why — we access the past through artworks by Areez Katki, Garima Gupta, Muzzumil Ruheel, Parag Tandel, Philippe Calia, Saju Kunhan, Sameer Kulavoor, and Saubiya Chasmawala. 

Event, Memory, Metaphor critically engages with the archival turn in contemporary art. Some of the artists in the show engage with the archive as a space of restitution and reconfiguration while others approach the archive as a site of contestation and fabulation, both grappling with increasingly blurred lines between fact and fiction. Yet others interrogate the urge to bear witness and, in a world transformed by technology, the increasing precarity of the permanence of bearing witness.

This show, borrowing its title from historian Shahid Amin’s seminal work on the politics of official memory around Chauri Chaura, bring together pertinent ongoing debates around the allure of the archive and the desire to turn to the past. Building upon Amin’s idea of the “recalcitrant event,” which in its impossibility of linear narration challenges the diktatsof official narratives, the accompanying essay by curator Anish Gawande probes the politics of the archive and its construction.