Ten artists from seven nations have come together to reflect on collective suffering, to prove that terror has no nationality. The exhibition “Nameless Here for Evermore” at Khoj Studios, Delhi, exemplifies that art can resist and remediate. Here, the journey of human grief is charted, from the 1984 riots in Punjab and Delhi, Naxal violence in the forests of Bastar, violence in Kashmir and the current situation in Afghanistan, to the anti-communist purge of the ’60s Indonesia. The world of terror is discussed, its origins and aftermath. “It’s an intense exhibition, dealing with important issues of current times,” says Navjot Altaf. The Mumbai-based artist’s video Soul Breath Wind is based in Chhattisgarh. “The loss and destruction of fertile land and soil has had severe impact on the day-to-day existence and identity of indigenous communities living there. The video addresses the impact of imposed segregation from their live-world. It deals with the conflicts between the communities and the police force, police force and the ultra-Left forces,” says Altaf. If American artist Joshua Oppenheimer’s film The Act of Killing offers an insight into the minds of mass killers, Berlin-based artist Virlani Rupini and New Zealand-based Leon Tan's collaborative single-channel video Receding Triangular Square invites audiences to explore Chinese and aboriginal (indigenous Taiwanese) philosophies and practices of healing as well as the dominant Euro-American mental health paradigm, and relates these to the larger social and historical framework of Taiwan’s development as a post-colonial and capitalist state. There are questions raised on the domestic front too. In her two-channel video Granted Under Fear, Sonia Jabbar takes a critical stance against the military occupation of Kashmir, and Delhi-based photographer Gauri Gill revisits Delhi’s resettlement colonies that were the heartland of the 1984 riots. She initiates a conversation by asking friends to write a comment alongside each photograph. She titles the series Jis tann lãgé soee jãné. “It’s a Punjabi saying, which translates as: only she whose body is hurt, knows. But perhaps it is also for those of us who were not direct victims, to try and articulate the history of our city, and universe. A world without individual stories, accounts, interpretations, opinions, secrets and photographs. It is indeed 1984 in the Orwellian sense,” says Gill. A statement, true, possibly, for the rest as well.
