New Dubai exhibition commemorates partition of India and Pakistan

• Jameel Arts Centre commemorates 75th anniversary of partition of India.
• Show features some sketches, pictures, and texts that reassessed past.
• Exhibition of proposals is modern way of connecting young people to history of partition and tragedies around it.

A show at Jameel Arts Centre commemorated the 75th anniversary of the partition between India and Pakistan, National News reported.

However, the event itself questioned what commemoration of the partition even meant. 

The show featured some sketches, pictures, and texts that reassessed the past.

Murtaza Ali invited artists 11 years ago as a part of a project he was working on to think about the creation of the two countries and the violence and chaos that accompanied it.

Vali said that over a decade ago, at that time, there were no memorials or monuments in any of the countries linked to the partition.

He said that there was no way a person could remember or lament the tragedy associated with the formation of the two states.

In 2017, a Partition Museum was inaugurated in Amristar India. National History Museum in Lahore at the same time showed some works of the  Citizens Archive of Pakistan which records oral accounts of the partition.

Vali decided to work with younger artists and look at the commemoration of the partition in a newer context. Therefore, he came up with the idea of art proposals.

Art proposals are when artists rethink an event and lay out their own creative ideas they have for it.

“Proposals were, for me, a way of diffusing the weight of addressing this traumatic moment,” he says. “The artists feel the burden of history, of politics. The idea of proposals was to alleviate some of that."

His decision to work with younger artists revealed the generational shift in thinking about the formation of India and Pakistan. 

Vali said that younger people were researching their grandparents' archives to find out more about the traumatic events.

The exhibition of proposals was a modern way of connecting young people to the history of the partition and the tragedies around it.