Material Memories

THE INDIAN SUMMER vacation often sees children returning to their ancestral homes— a place of belonging. These visits, even if short-lived, become a part of one’s intergenerational heritage. Conversely, the absence of such an event probes the question: What is home? How does one nurture the sense of belonging? How does one fill the gaps between home and memory? Arpita Akhanda’s artistic practice evokes the silences of her child­hood days. Unlike most of her classmates, the languid summers were spent in her Cuttack home, and not travelling to her native village, Comilla in Bangladesh. This lack of belonging propelled a quest that resulted in her winning the Sovereign Asian Art Prize 2025 for her woven artwork Dendritic Data lb. Represented and supported by Emami Art Gallery, Kolkata, Akhanda’s journey as a visual and performance artist is marked by the search to seek an answer to the question, ‘Where is your home?’

Winning the Sovereign Asian Art Prize 2025, renowned for its recognition of contributions to contemporary art, catapults Akhanda into the international spotlight. To Akhanda, the sudden surge of attention feels like an overnight phe­nomenon. However, this perception be­lies the years of labour, the hours spent in her studio, and the relentless exploration of her artistic vision. Born in Odisha, her artistic journey was not a sudden spark, but rather a slow, deliberate burn, kindled by her family’s legacy. Her grandfather, Asim Akhanda, and her father, Pranab Akhanda, were not mere hob­byists but dedicated practitioners, their lives interwoven with the processes of photography and printmaking.

Akhanda’s artistic practice is intertwined with her grandfather’s photographic legacy. Images capturing her ancestral home in Bangladesh, serve as potent visual anchors in her work, bridging per­sonal memory with broader his­torical narratives. Her grandfather’s migration from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to Kolkata, was initially fuelled by a pursuit of artistic education at Kala Bhavan in Santiniketan in 1941. However, his settlement in Odisha was not a simple, deliberate choice, but rather a consequence of the 1947 Partition. It was a response to shifting borders and the uncertain future faced by those caught in the crosscurrents of history. She says, “I grew up with stories of Partition woven into everyday life. My family migrated in 1947, and colonial history was not just something in books, it was present in conversations, in the silences, in the way my grandparents held onto memories of a home they could never return to.”

Her grandfather’s photographs, them­selves, are more than documentation; they are fragments of a lost world, imbued with the weight of displacement and the resilience of memory. They depict a home left behind, a landscape etched with the stories of generations, now viewed through the lens of a forced departure. These images often hint at the complex layers of identity and belonging that Akhanda explores in her art.

In 2018, Akhanda embarked on a piv­otal journey—a pilgrimage, in essence— to Bangladesh, guided by her father, to trace the vestiges of their ancestral home. Seventy-two years later, they found the same structure that her grandfather once had photographed. This expedition transcended the mere act of geographical exploration; it became an excavation of memory, a tangible connection to a past that had previously existed only in frag­mented photographs and whispered stories. Upon her return to India, she began to channel this experience into her art. She explored the ephemeral nature of memory, and how it can be both a source of solace and loss. “My work delves into the intricate relationship between present experiences and past trauma. I navigate this terrain by delving into inter-generational memories, inherited family archives, and the elusive quest for belonging or home,” she says.

Her practice further deepened through the influence of interactions with her paternal and maternal grandmothers, Sabita Rani Akhanda and Preeti Banerjee, whose lived experiences, beyond formal records, served as a prism through which she refracted and challenged patriarchal gazes, narratives, and lack of opportuni­ties for women. Akhanda says, “Both my paternal and maternal grandmothers cre­ated intricate embroideries, crochet, and kanthas. Alongside my grandfather who was an artist and poet, my grandmoth­ers therefore became my first influence and inspirations.” She also recalls how her grandfather left physical archives in the form of poems, photographs, documents, letters, telegrams, postcards, and travelogues, but in the case of her grandmother(s) it was just oral histories. This led to the making of the work Hath- Pakha, an ongoing documentation of the memories of her home through the memories of the women living in the family who came to India during/ after Partition.

Her art is rooted in the oral histories of her family, particularly those concerning Partition, migration, and the Indian free­dom struggle. Akhanda acknowledges the inherent fragility and fragmented nature of memory. These gaps, these ‘pixelate’ moments of temporal discon­tinuity, become a central element of her visual language. To articulate this, she employs the art of weaving. The warp and weft of her woven works become power­ful metaphors: the weft represents the intimate, personal narratives, the individual stories that comprise the fabric of memory, while the warp symbolises the more structured, institutional, and historical ac­counts that shape our understand­ing of the past. The interweaving of these elements visually embodies the lacunae, the missing pieces, which characterise memory. This co-existence and interaction highlight the complex relationship between personal experience and historical record.

Akhanda’s prize-winning work, Dendritic Data Ib was created during her 2024 residency at Hampi Art Labs. The work embodies her philosophy of time as a parallel, rather than linear progression, merging past and present. Inspired by site visits to Hampi, she saw a granite rock exhibiting a dendritic pattern—a motif mirrored in trees, water systems, and neural networks, reinforcing her con­cept of interconnectedness. A particu­larly striking element is her representa­tion of wind. Drawing inspiration from meteorological maps, she translates abstract conceptual thought into a compelling visual language, further emphasising the interconnectedness of natural phenomena and historical context within her work.

Arpita Akhandaart and culturedisplacementidentitykanthaspaper weaving work