Between Memory and History: Reading the familial in Amitesh Grover’s ‘WOUNDING’

In his poem, ‘By the Waters of the Sind,’ poet Agha Shahid Ali writes of the Partition of India, and asks, “So what is separation’s geography?” To read Shahid is to confront in his poetry the weight of migration, the alienations of diasporic life, and the burdens of memory passed down over generations. One is urged to bear witness to his deeply personal associations of home, loss and longing, evident throughout his body of work. Speaking of what is evidently a painful distancing, this poem by Shahid is almost archival in its tone, textured with nostalgia that he excerpts from the larger socio-political and economic reverberations of the Partition, building instead a more intimate mourning of the same through his verses. Narratives of the Partition document it as more than just a historic upheaval; even today, families relive the grief that it precipitated as a separation that seared through two nations. It continues to be remembered and documented in multiple, multicultural haptic manifestations, and in one such attempt to revisit retellings of the Partition handed down to him by his family, artist Amitesh Grover reads the familial against the grain, allowing for a ‘break’ in the cyclicality of grief and loss, especially in the ways in which it is described, articulated and imaged. 

In 2018, MASH India and the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) collaborated to institute the MASH FICA Award: Supporting New Media Art Practice to promote, expand and encourage critical perspectives on new media art. Amitesh Grover, an interdisciplinary practitioner working with theatre, visual art, film, installation, digital art and text-based art, received the award for his proposed project, Missing Bodies | Quantified Self. Responding to the exhibitionary aspects that were part of the scope of the project, Grover designed a series of interventions to outline and share the research he undertook. These interventions are conceived of as ‘episodes,’ and the first, titled “WOUNDING,” opened on 18 August 2021 at Project_Space at the FICA Reading Room in Lado Sarai, New Delhi. 

Grover’s work occupies a processual vocabulary that finds and incorporates iterations of social practice. He draws on themes that include the dualities of absence and presence, abandonment, modes of remembering and resistance, and forms of residual, invisible and inarticulable knowledge. Consistent across his practice is also a focused enquiry into forms and formulations of the body as it unravels across concepts of data and media.  We see an emphasis on experimenting with interactive environments positing viewer-led experiences that are governed by their own perception, perspective and proclivities. In Table Radica (2019), an episodic performance of five parts, the archival is an invitation to gather and partake in sensory stimulation and conversation. The archival is narrated, it is listened to, and witnessed; as a tendency, a potency and a poesy, foregrounding the lives of radical presences on stage in Modern Indian Theatre, looking at the strife, the precarity and the many vulnerabilities that accompany a life dedicated essentially to the arts. In 2018, Grover directed a theatre performance based on Shrilal Shukla’s Sahitya Academy Award-winning novel Raag Darbari. A reference that he chose to highlight during the episode at Project_Space, the book is a lyrical satire that follows the experiences of a spectatorial protagonist in Uttar Pradesh. For Grover, the book introduced him to the cultural milieu of the north, a landscape to which he held filial associations, especially through the figure of his maternal grandmother, a Hindi teacher who taught the novel. In a set of interactive performances titled, Sleep, the slumbering body absorbs and records experiences, subjectivities and situations. Through the series of interactive events that were conceived as part of this – Sleep I, II and III – Grover examined the relationship between sleep, economy and public/private property, working with fluctuating modes of participatory engagement, endurance and immersiveness.

In Missing Bodies | Quantified Self, he looks at the frictions between the body as data and the body as subject, augmenting an understanding of the somatic through a philosophically-oriented technological lens that in turn highlights a deeper, more nuanced take on the politics of seeing, documenting and archiving (forms of) the self. Grover worked with wearable technologies such as smart watches, chest straps, FitBits, glucose and blood sugar monitoring devices, gearing their proximities and possibilities towards a tracing of a body taking shape and coming into being. Grover chose to read each wearable item as producing data as knowledge, material for study, bringing him closer to questions of surveilling the self. Surveillance that resides within the portability of such wearable technologies affects the way we process ourselves, particularly in how we remember and recognise versions, forms and potentialities that reside within us. 

For WOUNDING, Grover impressed a central idea of the body that presented his considerations on his family archive of photographs, foregrounding personal memories of the Partition of India. As part of the process for the first episode, he took a set of vintage analog photographs from his family’s collection, scanned each one to preserve them, and proceeded to ‘intervene’ in their digital form by breaking the alphanumeric ASCII code. This code contains all the information required to hold the image together, and by writing into it the stories of his family members, Grover produced a hybridity, something that was not a photograph in its entirety but instead a concept of the image, exhumed via a conscious act of (un)making the ‘source.’ Introducing written memories into the ASCII code caused glitches and cracks in the resulting image, making it a carrier not only of the photographed bodies in the frame but also the weight of memory persistently embedded into its essence. 

The installation at Project_Space was curated as a mediation on the part of the artist, representing his archival research, emphasising the process of creating these ‘wounded’ images and their fragmentations. In an effort to incorporate the exhibitionary potential of the facades of the walls, Grover chose to plaster lines of ASCII code onto them, creating a background that reiterated the foundations of his experiment. The digital images were printed on Daguerra Canvas, and were suspended against the coated walls; this orchestrated a mode of viewing that drew attention to the specificity of memory inserted into the yards of unintelligible code as well as to the brilliant hues of the glitched, ‘wounded’ photographs hoisted against it. Bookending the image and text-based materialities of this episode was an audio interview that played in the space, echoing a conversation with the artist’s grandfather recounting his experience of the Partition, that he recorded as part of his research. In conversation with the FICA Team, Grover also put together a Reading Corner, stemming from some of the key texts and references that formed the basis of his research for the project at large, and for WOUNDING in particular. Appending the act of reading, the Corner created an interesting adjacency with the FICA Reading Room itself, engendering forms of participation geared towards the reflective. It also programmed a pause, allowing audiences to sit and stay awhile, engaging with the texts in their own annotative and annotated capacities. 

Affective environments are primordial for Grover, and WOUNDING was accompanied by an engaging discursive take on acts of perception that underscored the heaviness of the subject-matter at hand. The works showcased as part of the display made available a re-narration of sorts, and they represented Grover’s painstaking process of retrieving, compiling and preserving familial memories, creating in due time a microhistory of the Partition that both complicates and conveys the weight of such inheritances. Staggering the works over the walls, Grover mapped a thematic progression, centralising the women of his family on one wall, followed by clusters that focused on his maternal grandfather’s life, scenes from the artist’s childhood as well as certain images that conveyed the complexities of conjugal life pre- and post-Partition. The artist ensured the placement of each displayed work enacted associations between them, bringing forth memories of food and religio-cultural specificities in certain sections while also affording himself the space to identify and speak about the differences between the two sides of his family.

Writing on how we choose to engage with family photographs, Gillian Rose believes one does not abandon the politics of the medium by locating it within the domestic. As a site and as a milieu, the domestic is deeply political, particularly with regard to the performance of gender that in the context of India and South Asia, intersects critically with other identities, including but not limited to those of caste, religion and sexuality. As is evident even in Grover’s own processes, the familial is excavated over long periods of time, often emerging as an tangled accumulation instead of a decisive singularity. Rose also states that the making, documenting, and archiving of family life is labour intensive in the routines and circuits it establishes and expects. WOUNDING brought together Grover’s inclination to study and work with archives, microhistories and family photography around the Partition of India, and as part of his methodology, he recorded hours of interviews conducted with members of his family, spending time probing into the lives and memories of his maternal and paternal grandparents who were part of the generation that lived through the Partition. 

The narrativization of history is anxiety-ridden, it absorbs silence to the effect that it almost completely negates its presence within its annals. During this process of gathering his family’s memories of the Partition, Grover shed light on the pitfalls that underlie the writing of such histories. He found his grandparents hesitant to speak about their experiences, hinting at a recalcitrance of sorts, a resistance frictioning against the process of remembering itself. However, in contrast, while speaking to his parents, Grover found a nonchalant lack of association to the event and what followed; instead, he was able to dredge a sense of the uncertainties they faced in a newly Partitioned India that was both seeking and struggling to define itself in the face of strife.  Silence must be unearthed, it must be accorded its own occupation within history-writing, and somewhere in the rigours of this project, Grover facilitates an image of the family archive as a keeper of silence. The microhistorical, characterised particularly within the unit of the family, is often subjected to the fallibilities and inconsistencies of memory. Further, the intergenerational nature that catalyses inheritances of memory – particularly those of turbulent experiences –  is in itself ungainly and often flawed. However, what we see in a project like Grover’s is the coexistence of incompletion and omission with the narrative form itself, alongside a return to evolving notions of the familial where silence is acknowledged and the post-memorial is challenged in its transference down to the present moment. 

What is the image of the family that is conjured? How do we read it? WOUNDING offered a layered take on the act of intervention with corrugated modalities of intervening in/with/alongside/across ideas of coherence, inheritance, filiality and the (re)writing of histories. As Grover worked to introduce fragments of memory into the ASCII code of his scanned family photographs, the concept of the image presented grew to constitute one composed of both memory and data, possessing languages that visualise as well as veil. The image – along with the code – emerged as a malleable fragment, potent with a rich narrative capacity, threatened by the possibility of a flattening at the hands of a monocularity. WOUNDING juxtaposed the unsentimentality of data with the emotional value that imbues family photographs, but it also formulated an archival tendency within the code itself. This was a capacity for containing interventions that seek to rescript, and for releasing within the frame of the image a disruptiveness that flourishes within its disruptions. The alphanumeric nature of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is a language in itself, and as demonstrated in this first episode by Amitesh Grover, it accommodates within the potential to house the verbosity and semantic weight of other languages, particularly the incoherence of memory. 

Whether displayed or in albums, Gillian Rose writes, looking at photographs is a type of doing too. In her book, Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, the Public and the Politics of Sentiment, the women she interviews see this doing as part of their jobs. ‘Looking’ is also a part of their routine, and they do it when the photographs catch their eye, while they go about their work, during any part of their day. The looking is subliminal, full of sentiment that keeps these photographs centrally rooted in their lives and homes. With WOUNDING, there is a ‘doing’ that enters the surface of the image, occupying a simultaneously intrusive and subconsciously protective quality around the remembrances it desires to preserve. While ‘doing’ entails the mundanities of dating, storing, displaying, looking and circulating of family photographs, it also generates – and references – subjectivities and social relations. 

However, another aspect of ‘doing’ that one can possibly translate into the exhibition space of WOUNDING is the clustering of the digital photographs that articulates a spatial dispersion, recalling in its expanse the turbulence of separation that characterised the Partition. Rose argues that while family photographs in albums reiterate closeness and presence, it is their scattering (on walls and other surfaces) that reminds of absence and distance; gaps between photographs on walls, shelves, and cabinets are reminiscent of fractures and fissures within familial groupings, reenacting the manner in which domestic space is often haunted by disintegration. In a similar discursive attempt, Grover’s curatorial decisions with WOUNDING created a thought-provoking programming around the viewing of images and histories without an obvious imposition on the viewer, scripting a micro-narrative within the larger histories of the Partition, firmly grasping the splintering and the ruptures that form an intrinsic part of his – and many other – family archives.