When the Subaltern Speaks
“When the Subaltern Speaks is an exhibition by Shwarga Bhattacharjee that centers the intersections between modern identity, postcolonial borders, transnationalism, racism, and the lived experience of migration and displacement via a series of abstract paintings, animated illustration, and sculpture.
The Partition of India in 1947, the British-led division of the subcontinent into two independent nation states: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, has often been overlooked in examinations about modernity in world history. Bhattacharjee, who was born and raised in Bangladesh, presents a visual narrative that is rooted in his own transnational experiences, the intellectual history of postcolonial theory, and the concept of the subaltern or Other (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 1988).
In its multimodalities and abstraction, Bhattacharjee’s When the Subaltern Speaks is an exhibition that confronts the lasting and deleterious effects of British post-imperialism, emigration, and emergent modern identities in South Asia from an autoethnographic perspective.”
