Memory Stitched

To the artist,reading the letters was like going through someone’s photo album. To translate the letters visually,Aharoni has placed thousands of postcard-sized vintage photographs in a large rectangular glass box. He has a collection of over 30,000 old photographs of India from the early 1920s. “These are snippets of memories from my mother’s letters which she wrote in 1957 from Jerusalem. She makes subtle references to a time or a place that can be seen through the photographs,” says Aharoni. Among the photos,the artist has placed crumpled versions of his mother’s letters in Hebrew printed on thin wax papers.

The associations Aharoni makes between the letters and his encounters in India are noticeable. Once while walking on the streets of Patna,he came across a small studio that took passport-sized photos of people. “Years later when I was reading one of my mother’s letter,I came across names and faces that she had described at length. But I had never heard of them. They were just like those people in Patna,captured in a similar frame,” he says. In a collage titled,I Am Beloved’s and Beloved Is Mine,Aharoni has interposed six such photographs of strangers with excerpts from the letters.

The highlight of the show is the artist’s work in phulkari. Rich orange and red fabric with golden embroidery is mounted on original wooden looms on the walls of the room. Aharoni is drawn to the phulkari and the tradition behind the fabric. “On a visit to an old market in Delhi,I learnt how to make a phulkari shawl from an adolescent girl who gifted it to her mother-in-law as dowry. This very shawl came rushing to my mind as I was reading the dreams of another adolescent girl,my mother.”

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