Residues is a material inquiry into the complex relationship between communal violence and communal rape in post-Partition South Asia. To be post-Partition, is simultaneously to be post-colonial. Yet the wounds of Empire still infiltrate and seep through folds of diasporic and intergenerational memory today. This installation thus can be perceived as a site, an image of the aftermath of riot and upheaval, conscious of the weight of silence. Whether that be the silence of the archive or of history, its physical residue imprints itself upon everything it touches, violating both the subject and object, the perceptional and recollective gaze. 

Like all landscapes inflicted by colonial violence, this site too is in a state of constant becoming as the wet fabric panels suspended over bale-filled hessian bags, fade and harden over time. The red pigment filled clay pots too are ascertain to dry. Yet the residues of all that has been touched by violence remain, suggesting how the dual temporality and permanence of conflict, separation, dispossession and mutiliation are embedded into the consciousness of people possessing the burden of colonial history. 

Yet somewhere in-between, grass grows. Its verdurous blades pierce through the apparent neutrality of white walls. The site is left exposed, the gallery space having become no less of a landscape than the landscape itself. Nothing is removed from context, rather everything here concerns only two things: life and death. 

Review on Residues by Nikita Holcombe, Essay Link