Postcards from Home

Postcards from Home: Manisha Gera Baswani

Feb. 22-July 21, 2024
2nd Floor Lobby

Postcards from Home featured Manisha Gera Baswani’s photographic portrait series of 47 contemporary artists from India and Pakistan, paired with their corresponding accounts of memories of the 1947 Partition that created the two nation-states of India and Pakistan. The artist blurred geographical borders by photographing participants in their respective creative spaces, tethering their poignant narrations about what they or their parents remember of the "lost home" upon migration.

Born in India to parents of pre-Partition India and based in New Delhi, Baswani recalls a childhood filled with her parents’ stories about the home they left behind in present-day Pakistan. Forced to flee overnight, they left everything, including deep friendships nurtured through generations, never to return.

Manisha Gera Baswani, R.M. Naeem in Ahmen Khan's studio, Lahore

Baswani noted, “On the terrain of my heart, Pakistan is an island, an abode of my forefathers, floating away on the tears of Partition.” Having built a vast archive of her documentation of Indian artists for years, she had nursed the desire to do the same for Pakistani artists and found the opportunity to begin doing so in 2015. The artist found “generous support on both sides of the border.” She added, “The common sentiment—of deep pain, nostalgia, longing, and love for what was once ‘home’ on both sides of the border—was all-pervasive. I experienced their healing through the act of repeated narration of these heartfelt stories that soothe the permanently displaced and their kin who carry this legacy of grief. Each recounting [is] a muted hope that their memories are not buried in the sands of time. These stories continued to ring inside me like an echo of my own thoughts. I felt compelled to etch these tales, so they live beyond the teller.”

The project invited audiences to consider visual and textual frames of nostalgia. For South Asians, the narratives offered an opportunity to revive connections to a shared history both within the Indian subcontinent as well as in other parts of the world for the diaspora seven decades after Partition.

Postcards from Home was a rich tapestry of memories of home shared and shaped over generations suddenly sundered. Manisha Gera Baswani gently and masterfully coaxed artists from India and Pakistan to express their thoughts around Partition, capturing the vivid recollection of a sky empty of birds and void of bird sound (a chilling reflection of nature’s response to witnessing the human-against-human violence unleashed during Partition), of neighbors and friends protecting each other despite the political injunction toward polarizing estrangement, and of the lamentation over the harmonious co-existence of different religious practices being a thing of the past. Nostalgia over the romance of writing letters or listening to old songs on a gramophone harks back to a time of simple joys. As the painter R.M. Naeem observed, "Nations need boundaries...Love does not.”

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Manisha Gera Baswani is a multidisciplinary artist who weaves expressions of painting, photography, sculpture, and writing in her work. Artist through the Lens is a self-funded project she has been working on for nearly two decades, documenting artists in India and Pakistan. Postcards from Home was shown at the inaugural edition of the Lahore Biennale, the Faiz International Festival, and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, all in 2018; and at the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford from 2022 to 2023.