Open Wound – Stories of Partition – Pakistan

Open Wound, uses photo animations to explore the turmoil of families impacted by the Partition of India in 1947. It has been 70 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.

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.

This album includes the stories of Pakistani families. The stories strongly parallel those that I collected in India and echo accounts of recent refugees from Syria and other countries in conflict.

Sister project, “Open Wound — Stories of Partition — India”