EVENT: Understanding घर/Ghar (Home) with artist Arpita Akhanda

Inside creative research: Understanding घर/Ghar (Home) with Arpita Akhanda | Monday 13 February 2023 | In-person Workshop, Venue TBC | Register Here

In this workshop, you will be encouraged to explore various ways of understanding the concept of home, or ‘ghar’, through body, objects, and memories.

Arpita Akhanda (b.1992) was born and brought up in a family of artists who migrated from Bangladesh during the partition and moved through many locations in India before settling in Cuttack, Odisha. Working with a wide range of artistic mediums and disciplines, from paper weaving to performance, Akhanda’s works are interdisciplinary, revealing a subtle, wider connection to cultural politics, memory, and history. Growing up, listening to her grandparent’s traumatic relocation following the partition profoundly impacted the artist’s mind. Migration has been a recurring theme for Arpita, exploring the lost path of remembrance, narrating the sense of loss the body inherits from a bygone trauma.  

According to Arpita, the body is a carrier of memories. Where her understanding of the body is a psychological carrier bearing the silence, searching for the roof, shifting identities, and the political stance of the historical trauma. She developed a material understanding of it from the archives of the colonial and post-colonial memories in the form of poems, photographs, written documents, letters, telegrams, postcards, and oral histories which her grandparents and parents had collected over time.

The session, led by Akhanda and lecturer Sukie Sagoo-Reddy, will be split into two parts: the first part will be a body-movement-based workshop which will translate into a collective performance in the second part of the session

The series ‘Inside creative research’ takes a behind-the-scenes look at practice, learning and research with an increasing range of speakers from all UAL Subject areas. External speakers are invited to open up about their practice to UAL students, away from public-facing engagements.

Register here to join us on Monday 13 February 2023 at 16:00