Manisha Gera Baswani: Postcards from Home

Event date
19 Jan 2023 to 12 Mar 2023
Event time
10:00 - 17:00
Venue
Ashmolean Museum
Beaumont Street
Oxford
OX1 2PH
Event type
Exhibitions
Event cost
Free
Disabled access?
Yes
Booking required
Not required

Open now until 12 Mar 2023

Gallery 29

Admission is FREE

New Delhi-based artist Manisha Gera Baswani is a multidisciplinary artist who weaves expressions of painting, photography, sculpture, and writing in her work.

Her exhibition, Postcards from Home, marks the 75th anniversary of India’s partition. It features postcards of 47 artists from India and Pakistan, all with a shared history of the partition of India in 1947.

Each postcard carries an image of a contemporary artist photographed by Baswani, while the reverse of the card carries a poignant memory of that artist reminiscing the ‘home’ lost.

The installation invites the audience to visual and textual frames of nostalgia, to revive a shared connection of a common history, with the South Asian diaspora that arrived in Britain before, during, and after 1947.

Manisha Gera Baswani was born in 1967 in India to parents of pre-partition India. Her childhood was embellished with stories of her parents reminiscing, with nostalgia and pain, their ‘home‘ in present-day Pakistan. Forced to flee overnight, they left everything, including deep friendships nurtured through generations, never to return.

This exhibition is Baswani’s homage to her parents’ memories of ‘home’.