Everyday Partitions

Abstract

This article analyses two exhibitions of contemporary South Asian art ‘My East is Your West’ (Palazzo Benzon, Venice, 2015) and ‘This Night-Bitten Dawn’ (24 Jor Bagh, New Delhi, 2016) that took up Partition as an everyday effect rather than a historical event. Departing from the national art survey model that has dominated museum and international exhibition venues such as the Venice Biennale since the early 2000s, both exhibitions focused on the complex afterlives of the Partition of 1947 and highlighted its recursive character. In so doing, they presented a critique of contemporary nationalism and globalisation through the trope of Partition, enacting what Gayatri C Spivak has called a critical regionalism against ‘identitarianism’. This regionalism is not a regional style, but an analytic mode, critical stance, and historically-informed approach to the region and its borders, nations and partitions. ‘My East is Your West’ and ‘This Night-Bitten Dawn’ imagined a region across shifting sites and scales, and claimed belonging to Partition, that is, to division and dislocation as the basis of identity, territory, community and society in South Asia.