Gallery 4
Residues
Vedika Rampal
Roomsheet
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. Rampal’s 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 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 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.
*The Partition refers to the historical event of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan which resulted in the creation of two separate nation states in the departure of the British Empire.