Turning erasures into compassionate art

For her haunting new series of works, artist Saubiya Chasmawala looked afresh at old family photo albums for inspiration

- Zeenat Nagree

In my mind, I compare looking at photographs of one’s childhood to throwing a beloved object into the sea. It returns, undoubtedly, but it appears altered, and we cannot help but admire the object for the novel and unexpected attributes it reveals itself to have. It reminds us that we too have transformed in the interim, washed by the waves of time.

It is even stranger to look at photographs of someone else's childhood. We don’t have the memories or the myths to enter them and we must look for portals that emerge from our own experiences. To me, the photographs that artist Saubiya Chasmawala has used for almost a decade in her paintings are nevertheless quite familiar. I have known firsthand the kind of grave sites that her family made pilgrimages to when she was a child. I know the abstraction that such a visit requires—one is there to attend to a haunting presence, to revere it, and to acknowledge the power that a formless force can have on one’s spiritual imagination.

Chasmawala has worked on these photographs in different ways over time. Early on, she would conceal the faces of the visitors—all members of her family—making us think we are looking at ghosts. She has made incisions into the surfaces of the paper, bound bodies with thread, and expressed a sense of longing and frustration through washes of white that obliterate the surrounding landscape, allowing us viewers to travel from the particular event depicted to a contemplation of wounding. How porous the appearance of injury and healing can be when it is distilled into a moment!