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Image Credit - Emami Art
Arpita Akhanda was born in Cuttack, Odisha, in 1992 into a family of artists who had emigrated from Bangladesh to India before the partition. She received her degree in painting from Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati, in 2017. Arpita's understanding of independence and the division of her country was shaped by the collections of colonial and post-colonial memories that her grandparents and parents cherished, including poems, photographs, written documents, letters, telegrams, postcards, oral histories, silence, the search for a roof, shifting identities, and political stance. Her art practice developed out of the need to decolonize these memories.
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Image Credit - Emami Art
Arpita is interested in finding a relationship between memories-migration-body and materials. She uses paper weaving as a method for fusing the weft of current circumstances with the warp of memories to produce a fabric that challenges identity and existence. A pixelated, fragmented, concealed, dissected, and blurred visual language is created by weaving together the two layers, which represent the past and the present. This language is used as a metaphor to represent the lost and forgotten narratives. Describing herself as a "memory collector", old letters, documents, photographs are treated as building blocks of art. “I am deeply interested in personal histories, which tend to get diluted when placed next to the more institutional forms of history. It struggles to find a voice, a paragraph or any recognition."
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Image Credit - Emami Art
She participates in numerous national and international exhibitions and works in a variety of genres, such as paper weaving, performance, installation, drawing, and video.She is now enrolled in the Netherlands' Jan Van Eyck Academie Residency programme for artists (2022-23). She has performed at venues such as Teertha International Performance Platform in Sri Lanka and Chittagong Art College in Bangladesh.