Description:

The 1947 Partition has been fecund ground for Manisha Gera Baswani’s art practice, most prominently in ‘Postcards from Home’, in which she photographed 47 artists from India and Pakistan, with shared history and lineages on both sides of the border. Personal history – Manisha’s parents were witnesses to the depredations of 1947 and she grew up on stories of the ‘home’ and friends they left overnight – lends poignancy to the images, which feed into a collective sentiment of nostalgia, and invoke the futility of borders.

A similar sensibility permeates the three works here, which gesture at borders and wire fences, their most recognizable manifestation. In If Fences Gathered Moss and the diptych, If Borders Became Gardens, Manish creates a delicate tracery of lines using pin incisions on paper and fine brush strokes in green water colour which appear like wire fences encased in moss, gesturing both at the permanence of borders and also at the gardens – a symbol of hope and common heritage – on both sides of the fence.

In Bleeding Borders, which the artist began working on at the height of the China-India border dispute at Doklam some years ago, she uses red paint, instead of green, and the lines come together in calligraphic markings to form a mock-Chinese script, in a veiled suggestion of continued aggression along borders. “Yet, this is not the only sense of the work,” writes the art critic Bharti Chaturvedi about this work. “The red are flowers too.” The diptychs, in which the forms are duplicated in pin perforations on thick black paper, allude to a further veneer of darkness, and the continued disruptions along the country’s borders. But conversely – especially in the context of Manisha’s recent practice which draws on acupuncture and modern medicine systems – the needle and its small ruptures are also a precursor to healing, small acts of violence to mitigate the wounds of history.