Arjuna Keshvani-Ham

To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider

- Saidiya Hartman

Migrant Images I: Finding Your Mother stages an encounter with a collection of found objects: a set of colonial postcards and a collection of photographs and films drawn from the artist's family archive. A consideration of the legacies, technologies and history of colonial image-making is interwoven with personal reflections on the artist's own experience of travelling through Mumbai whilst returning to her grandfather's home in India through letters addressed to her mother. The film uses superimposition of images––a modern reinterpretation of illusion-building strategies like double exposure used in the production of colonial postcards––to draw attention to the illusion of photography's indexicality.

Migrant Images II: Snapshots of Lagos is a site-specific investigation into a triangulation of sites – a museum, a mass grave, and a monument – in Lagos, a forgotten town on the coast of Portugal to which many historians trace the roots of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Beginning as an attempt at forensic investigation, descending quickly into a labyrinth of self-doubt, the film develops a voice which is unceasingly – obsessively – self-reflective, a gaze dramatically aware of itself as mediated. Simultaneously, the narratorial voice draws attention to and reflects on its role as a witness to historical trauma, to a story over which the speaker gradually realises she has no claim.

This film is part of an ongoing interdisciplinary and collaborative project with various iterations: a digital archive, essay films, documentaries, public interventions.

Migrant Images III: The House My Grandfather Built interrogates the gaps and silences at the heart of the artist's family history, one of constant movement, migration & displacement. She returns to the village in India which her grandfather left as a teenager in the years following partition in 1947. A series of colonial-style postcards made by the artist, which capture scenes of everyday life in her grandfather's hometown become the prompts for an oblique opening up of repressed histories - both on the individual and national levels.