This anti-memorial triangulates public monuments in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, through artistic interventions, and juxtaposes the counter-memories of the Partition of India in 1947, and the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, as a memory triad.
The forced migration of the Partition of India displaced 20 million people in 1947 and 30 million people in the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. This anti-memorial seeks to memorialize this mass displacement of people.
This anti-memorial reframes maps and cartography, as the skin of the nation. It examines the partitions of countries from the 20th century – India, Ireland, Palestine, Cyprus, Vietnam, Korea, Germany, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Image Credits
All Images Are © Pritika Chowdhry
Guest Artist Bio
Pritika Chowdhry
Pritika Chowdhry is a socio-political, activist artist, curator, and writer. Born and brought up in India, Pritika is currently based in Chicago, IL, USA. She has an MFA in Studio Art, and an MA in Visual Culture and Gender Studies, both from the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
Pritika’s works are featured in prestigious museum and corporate collections, such as the Weismann Museum, American Swedish Institute, the Target Corp, in Minneapolis, MN; in addition to several private collections.
Through her art projects, Pritika presents narratives elided from dominant cultural discourse to disrupt hegemonic collective memories. Her large-scale sculptures and site-sensitive installations reference the body to memorialize unbearable and difficult memories.
Pritika has also founded the Counter-Memory Project and the Partition Memorial Project as part of her research-based artistic praxis. Transnational in scope, her works comprise sculptural art installations that excavate counter-memories from traumatic geopolitical events, such as, partitions of countries, civil and military wars, riots, border violence, genocides, and terrorist attacks. Pritika makes anti-memorials, which flips the idea of traditional memorialization and nationalist monuments on its head. She seeks to connect seemingly disparate geopolitical contexts as she feels that it is important to bring bridges into being. Counter-memories of communities and nations provide the viscera with which she builds these bridges in her work.
As an interdisciplinary artist, she migrates between fibers, latex, paper, clay, glass, metal, wood, poetry, and drawing. The maker in her enjoys the sensuality of different materials, and the scholar in her pursues the cultural references that different materials introduce into her work.
Pritika has shown her works nationally and internationally in group and solo exhibitions in the Weismann Museum in Minneapolis, Queens Museum in New York, the Hunterdon Museum in New Jersey, the Islip Art Museum in Long Island, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, the DoVA Temporary in the University of Chicago, the Brodsky Center in Rutgers University, and the Cambridge Art Gallery in Massachusetts.
Moreover, Pritika is the recipient of a Vilas International Travel Fellowship, an Edith and Sinaiko Frank Fellowship for a Woman in the Arts, a Wisconsin Arts Board grant, and a Minnesota State Arts Board grant. Pritika has taught at Macalester College, and College of Visual Arts, both in St. Paul, Minnesota. Published scholarship about Pritika’s work has come out in peer-reviewed research publications and various exhibition catalogs.
Pritika has presented her studio research projects at various national conferences, such as the International Arts Symposium at NYU, The Contested Terrains of Globalization at UC-Irvine, and the South Asian Conference at UW-Madison. Pritika also participates in panels and gives lectures and artist talks about her work by invitation.
Please visit www.pritikachowdhry.com to learn more about Pritika Chowdhry’s art and curatorial projects.
Blog / Website: Pritika Chowdhry
Follow Pritika Chowdhry on: Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin
Please Share Your Thoughts - Leave A Comment!