The exhibition unfolds as a cartography of exile—tracing the submerged roots of forced displacement and its reverberations in the bureaucratic violence of the present. Migration here is not simply the act of crossing land, but a rupture of belonging, a ceaseless contest between names and borders, memory and legality, past and sovereignty. Anchored in the enduring wound of a historic severance, the exhibition explores dislocation not as a singular event but as a prolonged condition of becoming—an unending arrival.
What begins as a reckoning with geopolitical fracture—its torn geographies, silenced traumas, and the violent remapping of home—bleeds into a contemporary theatre of suspicion and exclusion. The works speak to a continuum of erasure: families fragmented by arbitrary lines; entire communities transformed into zones of uncertainty; individuals rendered stateless by the slow violence of clerical precision. Migration here is not abstract—it is a system of control, enacted through the cold grammar of paperwork and exclusion.
The exhibition interrogates this regime of identification. Who is allowed to belong? Who is marked as alien, intruder, or ghost? These questions are etched not in abstraction but in materials—bodies, rituals, maps. They surface in blurred photographs, fragmented topographies, and disrupted archives. Through gestures both intimate and monumental, the works articulate the granular horror of systemic erasure—not as spectacle, but as daily attrition.
Names, once symbols of ancestry and devotion, have become instruments of classification. The exhibition draws from traditions where language embodied inclusivity, invoking a cosmopolitanism now under threat. In these works, names return as incantations rather than indictments—as acts of spiritual resistance.
Through installations and layered drawings, the exhibition maps a terrain where memory resists deletion. Blank spaces pulse with interrupted lives. A name sung, a stitch traced, a map altered—each act becomes a quiet defiance. Against the violence of forgetting, these works insist on remembrance—not as sentimentality, but as political critique.
This is not an archive of sorrow, but a refusal. It confronts a present where movement is policed, humanity is criminalised, and identity is reduced to digits. Yet within every rupture, there is leakage. Against walls, the body remembers. Against exile, it returns—in ritual, in resonance, in breath. The exhibition becomes that return. A gathering of testimonies. A reclamation of self, memory, and home.
Curated by Prayag Chakradhar