SESSION: Embodied Histories, Dislocated Objects: Creative Practice and the Legacies of Empire in South Asia and its Diasporas
This session critically engages with the enduring impacts of British colonialism on cultural heritage in South Asia and its diasporas, with a specific focus on how creative practice, and particularly performance and other embodied or participatory forms, can function as a method of historical investigation and decolonial critique.
Grounded in postcolonial and decolonial thought and informed by performance and archival theory, the session foregrounds subaltern voices and vernacular epistemologies to explore how artists and researchers contest the erasures, silences, and imperial logics that persist in UK public collections. It seeks to surface how embodied creative practices can interrogate colonial-era museum holdings, propose new paradigms for cultural interpretation, and reimagine diasporic collective memory.
Together, the papers will consider:
- how creative embodied practices can be used to decolonize marginalized historical narratives and cultural collections;
- the roles that vernacular or performance traditions can play in challenging colonial frameworks and fostering alternate ways of knowing;
- and how lived experience and diasporic memory intersect with the colonial residues embedded in art objects and institutional collections.
Session Convenors:
Anjalie Dalal-Clayton, Decolonising Arts Institute, University of the Arts London
Speakers:
Sujatro Ghosh, University of Manchester
Prosaic Elegy for Hungry Streets
This paper examines how memory, desire, and justice converge within artistic practice to rethink the afterlives of the Bengal Famine of 1943. In the famine of 1943, more than three million people perished, yet it remains profoundly underrepresented in global narratives of the Second World War. I will argue that the famine’s archival silences are not merely gaps in documentation but wounds that continue to shape how hunger is embodied, remembered, and resisted across generations. By engaging with concepts of memory as lived inheritance, desire as the longing for nourishment and dignity, and justice as a demand for historical accountability, my work reframes famine not only as a man-made colonial catastrophe but as an affective and intergenerational condition.
Drawing on a practice-as-research methodology, my project, Prosaic Elegy for Hungry Streets, weaves together filmmaking, oral history, performance, and recipe-based interventions to explore how artistic methods can unsettle colonial accounts of the famine. These creative strategies include communal cooking and participatory dinners, visual media such as film and photographs, sonic archives, and embodied performance. Together, they serve as counter-archives that challenge imperial narratives and foreground the lived textures of hunger. Cooking collectively and gathering oral histories become modes of resistance, allowing communities to reclaim authority over how their stories of loss, survival, and longing are told.
My paper will discuss this project and other selected works from my artistic practice, focusing on how they interrogate the embodied memories of hunger that persist more than eighty-three years after the famine in both Bengal, and in diasporic communities. It will situate this work within broader South Asian memory practices and contemporary conversations on colonial afterlives, drawing on scholarship in decolonial studies and performance theory. Ultimately, the paper will demonstrate how artistic and embodied methodologies can generate new understandings of famine memory, offering alternative frameworks for thinking about hunger, repair, justice, and collective remembrance today.
Grace Xiao, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis
(Dis)location, Diaspora, and the Camera Image: Zarina Bhimji in the 1980s
In 1989, Zarina Bhimji was invited by the Victoria and Albert Museum to intervene in the space of the museum with a large-format Polaroid camera. Inserting personal objects and, at times, even her own body into the space of the collections, the resultant ten haunting photographs probe the museum’s and the photographic medium’s fraught ties to colonialism, informed by Bhimji’s personal histories of displacement. While Bhimji is perhaps most known for her video work of the 2000s, I turn to her 1989 work to situate her as an artist emerging from the 1980s amidst the establishment of the British black arts movement and the rise of Third World feminist movements. Drawing primarily from Édouard Glissant’s opacity and Anne Anlin Cheng’s ornamentalism, I argue that the illegibility and disappearance of the body in many of these photographs – the literal objectification, or turning into an art object, of the body – raises questions surrounding the relationship between visibility and power. Thus, I mobilize the term dislocation in two different ways. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, dislocation can be read in relation to diasporic subjectivities that reject any clear identification with nation-state boundaries in favour of an understanding of identity that is constantly in flux. Secondly, I also view Bhimji’s work as it relates to dislocating the corporeal body, as she deconstructs the ideal of a type of neoliberal subjecthood that is presumed to always be whole and knowable, instead turning to the generative possibilities of visually fragmenting the South Asian feminized body.
Bhavana Ram Mohan, University of Exeter
Dancing for the Bronzes: Interventionist Performance Practice and Re-Imagining Representational Heritage Discourses
It is widely acknowledged that colonial politics continue to underpin contemporary exhibitionary practices of Western ethnographic museums (Rowlands et. al., 2025) and manifest through their universalising frameworks of interpretation and ocular-centric modes of display. This paper presents two unauthorised, site-specific performance interventions I conducted in 2023 in the South Asia galleries of the British Museum and the V&A as case studies to investigate how embodied performance research that circumvents institutional authority can help stage a critique of, and develop a politics against, representational heritage practices. My practice combines scholarship on the body as an incorporated cultural archive with body-led dance research to advance the conceptualisation of heritage as a bodily encounter and contribute to the recent affective turn in heritage studies. Furthermore, this paper examines the implications of my drawing on the Indian Classical dance form of Bharatanatyam to inform the performance methodology for these works, delineating the complexities and identifying future directions for intercultural performance practice as decolonial critique in Western museums.
Raisa Kabir, University of the Arts London
Re-Weaving the Archive – embodied research methods, craft-performance, and South Asian Textile colonial histories
In this paper, I will explore how embodied craft practices, such as weaving, embroidery, and textile-making, can function as creative research methods that recentre the agency of the artisan-maker within South Asian textiles held in colonial museum collections. Focusing on gestural traces left by makers, including stitched and embroidered names found in museum collections at institutions such as the V&A and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I consider how these marks may operate as active archives of re-embodied knowledge.
The paper brings together my practice-led artistic research with archival study to explore vernacular practices present within the V&A’s collections, including Indian Company paintings of weavers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These images illustrate loom technologies and invite close, magnified readings of South Asian textiles as sites of embodied labour and knowledge. Through craft performance and ‘performing with the archive’, I will demonstrate how such practice-led investigations enable textiles in colonial collections to be approached as objects that speak in their own right, functioning as counter-narratives from communities whose lives were recorded under colonial conditions.
Drawing on my own artistic and performance-based textile practice, I will examine how embodied craft research, through weaving, loom building, and textile performance, can activate colonial histories of South Asian resistance across circuits of trade, encounters with material histories, and textile labour practices. I will argue that remnants of vernacular craft performance preserved in museum collections possess the potential to resist the colonial structures under which they were archived and to reframe colonial narratives within postcolonial and diasporic contexts as active archives of re-embodied knowledge.