Manisha Gera Baswani was born in 1967 in India to parents of pre-partition India. Her childhood was embellished with stories of her parents reminiscing, with nostalgia and pain, their ‘home’ in present day Pakistan. Forced to flee overnight, they left everything, including deep friendships, nurtured through generations, never to return. Postcards from Home is Baswani’s homage to her parents’ memories of home.
Based in New Delhi, Baswani is a multidisciplinary artist, who started using the camera as an additional instrument to capture moments midway through her painterly journey. This project comprises postcards of 47 artists from India and Pakistan, all having a shared history with the Partition of India in 1947. Each postcard carries an image of a contemporary artist photographed by Baswani, while the reverse carries a poignant memory of that artist reminiscing the ‘home’ lost.
The display invites audiences to visual and textual frames of nostalgia, to revive a shared connection of a common history, with the South Asian diaspora that arrived in Britain before, during, and after 1947. The audience is encouraged to take home postcards, retrieving cards out of dispensers as well as the installation display boxes in the gallery.
