Be it trinkets, recipes, the love for films, or stories passed from mouth to mouth, heritage and inheritance come in many forms. Museum of Memories, an ongoing multimedia exhibition curated by Sandbox Collective, featuring six women and queer artists, aims to take a closer look at these memories of heritage through the lens of gender, navigating layers of joy, turmoil, hope, and pain within them.
The questions at the centre of the showcase are ‘how are we constructing our identities?’ and what are we carrying with us?’, shares Charulatha Dasappa, one of the curators alongside Aakriti Chandervanshi. “For us, as women and queer people, looking into our heritage sometimes involves piecing things together and confronting the gaps while asking what is being handed down to us, while sometimes rejecting parts of this heritage,” she explains, adding that there are multiplicities in each individual’s personal story. “I think our job is to make space for all those things to exist.”
The six works on display use films, photographs, writing, and visual art to examine their gendered experiences of heritage. A conceptual photography project by Hridya Sadanand scrutinises the taboos around menstruation, particularly around the kitchen, as an inheritance. Shyamli Singbal’s artwork, on the other hand, depicts her and her mother messily and happily sinking their teeth into mangoes, defying etiquette expectations imposed on women.
Cinema Paithiyam by Tulika Bhattacharjee, one of the two films being screened, was made when she was a film student and looks at her love of movies as heritage passed down from her grandmother. “Her mother, viewing films as a waste of time, says the obsession with them seems to have skipped a generation, like sometimes illnesses do. It connects this idea of cinephilia as something that’s passed down, and what that means for someone who’s a woman, and moving between the public and private space,” explains Dasappa.
Alai Karthikeyan’s Skin Sculpting is the second film, grappling with barriers felt by the artist in communicating the trans experience to people who are not trans. “The audio you hear is a Tamil folk tale about a baby that’s born without a face, but the English subtitles don’t match the Tamil audio and instead present the artist’s thoughts. It uses the language barrier to reflect on the fact that the trans experience is almost impossible to translate to someone who is not trans,” adds Dasappa.
The exhibit has several interactive elements too, particularly in Hina Siddiqui and Ayera Choudhary’s exhibits, which ask visitors to take or leave something behind, respectively. “Hina’s collections of recipes have been gathered from her blood family and chosen family, bringing together how recipes are handed down, but in this way, it also becomes an exchange – visitors are prompted to carry some of these recipes home with them, too. Meanwhile, Ayera has all sorts of writing and trinkets from their queer polyamorous household in the form of a tree that people contribute to. It’s a way of looking at heritage as a growing, living thing for queer people – sometimes, we need to construct our heritage,” says Dasappa.
(Museum of Memories is open to visitors till July 18 from 11am to 5pm at Studio 345, Cooke Town. Entry is free)