The memory collector

Blending performative photography, paper weaving and archival material, Arpita Akhanda's art interrogates what we choose to remember and forget.

- ARMAN KHAN

A WOMAN IN white, covered in barbed wire, sits cross-legged on the floor. She is not still. The wire is tangled in her hair. Then she does something strange: with her bare hands, in a room full of spectators too stunned to record the scene with their phones, she slowly unspools the barbed wire. It cuts into her fingers, a nick here, a gash there. Cuts sprout across her palms. Children in the audience ask their parents why she does not protect her hair or wear gloves. No one knows.

Arpita Akhanda performed her work 360 Minutes of Requiem for six hours over two days at the India Art Fair in 2022. “The physical pain was one thing, but during the performance, it was difficult to think of people—past and present—divided by borders and the way they are still making journeys over barbed wire. So I invited people to sit next to me and psychologically untie these barriers,” she says.

During the performance, many in the audience wrote short notes to her, some of them promising that they would never be a part of things that divide. “I lost my thumbprint for a month because the pressure on the thumb to untie barbed wire is a lot. In losing it, I briefly lost my identity too,” she recounts.

Born in Cuttack in Odisha and now based in Santiniketan in West Bengal, the 31-year-old artist prefers being known as a memory collector. Akhanda’s work is not limited to a singular medium. She believes that stories will save us and that preserving what used to be is the only way to make sense of the chaotic present.

The preservation journey began on a personal note—she was rummaging through her grandfather’s tattered diary pages to locate their ancestral village of Shreekail in present-day Bangladesh. The impetus to discover it came much earlier: in school, when her classmates asked where her family was from, she never had an answer.