ArchiveExhibition
Manisha Gera Baswani: Postcards from Home, 1947 and the partition of India
1 Oct 2022-12 Mar 2023
Ashmolean Museum
Oxford OX1 2PH
Overview
New Delhi-based artist Manisha Gera Baswani is a multidisciplinary artist who weaves expressions of painting, photography, sculpture, and writing in her work.
Her exhibition, Postcards from Home, marks the 75th anniversary of India’s partition. It features postcards of 47 artists from India and Pakistan, all with a shared history of the partition of India in 1947.
Each postcard carries an image of a contemporary artist photographed by Baswani, while the reverse of the card carries a poignant memory of that artist reminiscing the ‘home’ lost.
The installation invites the audience to visual and textual frames of nostalgia, to revive a shared connection of a common history, with the South Asian diaspora that arrived in Britain before, during, and after 1947.
Manisha Gera Baswani was born in 1967 in India to parents of pre-partition India. Her childhood was embellished with stories of her parents reminiscing, with nostalgia and pain, their ‘home‘ in present day Pakistan. Forced to flee overnight, they left everything, including deep friendships nurtured through generations, never to return. This exhibition is Baswani’s homage to her parents’ memories of ‘home’.
