THE HOUSE MY GRANDFATHER BUILT

Mixed media installation and short experimental documentary

Medium: Copper armature with three channel video installation, single-channel projection, card.
Dimensions: 200x200cm
Country: UK
Year: 2023

The House my Grandfather Built is an interrogation of the silences and gaps at the heart of the filmmaker’s family history. She returns to the village in India which her grandfather left when he was a teenager, in the years after partition. A series of colonial-style postcards, which capture scenes of everyday life in her grandfather’s hometown in the present day, framed as if from the perspective of an unattached colonial observer, become the prompts for an oblique opening up of silenced and repressed histories - both on the individual and national levels.

Install shots from “The House My Grandfather Built”, RCA Graduate show 2023.

‘25 Views of Amreili’  is a series of twenty-five postcards produced by the artist, which capture images of Amreili, the town in which her grandfather was living during the partition of India in 1947. During the early years of the twentieth century, postcards were produced and distributed en masse. They were among the first mass-produced, widely-accessible images of the colonies available to the public in the colonising countries - and so generate imaginaries of the colonies. Their views are partial and attenuated; they tend to exoticise; often shot in studio settings, they are deeply, inherently theatrical. 

My views of Amreili play with the form and history of the postcard. The places they memorialise often appear arbitrary: a bus stop, the inside of a hospital, an unmarked gravestone - all in a town which is still barely on the map. They raise questions of commodification and exoticisation; they draw attention to and question my own precarious position as documenter and investigator of my grandfather’s history. Am I too an outsider, another tourist, a perpetrator of the exoticising gaze? 

The artist’s paternal great grandfather (Mahan Dada) was a pedlar in the Gujarati region of Amreili who would, with a sack over his back, travel the village daily shouting ‘Chhe koi Tamba Peetal’no Bhangar’. He would collect the broken scrap from villagers for hammering and repair overnight or offer a scrap fee if not repairable. The family’s livelihood was thus literally dependent on this daily collection, restoration and recycling of brass and copper. Copper (Cu ), a chemical element with atomic number 29 in the periodic table, is sacred in Indian philosophy for both its ayurvedic healing properties and its connection to family sustenance as the vessels (Khanda Gagar) women use for collecting and purifying water from rivers and wells and in food preparation. The artist has constructed the support for this Lagerstätte from copper piping; her personal labour in its construction forming a struggle and meditation, excavation and equivocation upon the labours of her great grandfather and the village which gave birth to her grandfather.