India

Archana Hande was born in 1970 to a Kannadiga Brahmin family; technocrats who were precariously balancing a traditional belief system and the call of cosmopolitanism in a post independent industrial town. Rourkela, the town with its colonial heritage of hierarchical cityscape, modernist – nationalist zeal for developmental construction and the impending political upheaval of the landless, was bursting at the seams. A White town, Black town, Grey town.

The memory of the hegemonic cityscape of the childhood refracts through the young artist's haunt for a 'room of her own' through the by lanes of the mega city, "developing" and "evolving" with murderous zeal. Desire and memory become one complex pattern of shadows and lines, sepia photos and surveillance images blur into each other, authentic and fake become as indistinguishable as tresses of identities in the Bombay local trains. The city and its stiff graph of citizenry, colonial legacy and post-globalisation race of growth; the topography of the urbanity through the blue plastic of the shanty roofs … get entangled in the mirror which is also our boundary wall, the Lakshmanrekha of the gated community.

Created as part of her travelogue, Archana’s works meanders through the journey of human identity impacted by geographical borders shifting in response to trade: be it from the port cities of Bombay and Calcutta, the Indian Ocean or from the cities across the Silk - Salt route and the Goldfields trail in Australia. The Silk route hedges traverse through parts of India, Pakistan, Nepal and Tibet, continuing the ‘Afghan’s’ journey across the trading communities which dot this area from the 12th century. Textile mills in Bombay, Patola makers in Patan, merchant travelling in Tibet to salt trading in Nepal, complete the route.