Description:  ‘Broken Column: Monuments of Forgetting’.

This anti-memorial is an ongoing site-specific, research-based art project that interrogates the role of public monuments in the formation of collective memory. This project triangulates monuments built in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, in the wake of the Partitions of 1947 and 1971. The primary sites of my research are the Minar-e-Pakistan memorial, in Lahore, Pakistan; the Shaheed Minar, in Dhaka, Bangladesh; and the Jallianwala Bagh memorial in Punjab, India.

These relational sites of memory are architectural palimpsests where memories of multiple events have sedimented over time. This project investigates how collective memories of the partitions of 1947 and 1971 are made legible or erased through these monuments, and if these monuments can be triangulated to function as a “memory triad” that connects as well as exceeds their individual historical contexts.

Latex and silicone casts of sections of the monuments such as stairs, walls, doors, niches, and ornaments, capture details and textures of intimate spaces within the larger architecture. The skin-like materials make the “body” of the monument accessible in a corporeal manner. I think of these casts as the “skin” of the monuments which reveal every mark, stain, and blemish that has accumulated on its surfaces since it was constructed.

This installation attempts a metaphoric triangulation of the three sites of memory by juxtaposing the corporeal remains of these monuments and bridging the geographical and political disconnect between these monuments and the countries in which they exist.