Open Wound – Stories of Partition – India

Open Wound, uses photo animations to explore the turmoil of families impacted by the Partition of India in 1947. It has been 65 years since the Partition, where 12 million people were displaced within three months and over a million died. But unlike tragedies such as the Holocaust, there is no memorial about the Partition. There is little for the larger public to understand and commemorate those impacted by this tragedy.

Historians such as Ramachandra Guha have written about repeated incidents of violence in India, since 1947, have been echoes and reverberations from the initial trauma of Partition. It is important to honor and collectively remember the people who were affected by the Partition. It is also important to know our violent history in order not repeat it.

My work builds on the way old images reignite memories and, like a time machine, take us back to a different time. The ephemeral animations in Open Wound are built from old family photographs combined with recent photographs of three or more generations and added excerpt narrating the families’ experience allows the viewer to ponder the past and its continuing consequences. The digital photo animation makes it appear that the old and new images magically flow one into another. The animations weave in and out of spaces of time, allowing the viewer to simultaneously ponder India’s history and the impact of that on contemporary India.