16. in/ /between
2018, Wing Luke Museum, Seattle, WA + Gallery Space, Providence, RI
this work began with a poem about absence.
i traveled to panjab for research in the summer of 2018 with the hopes of seeing the indian-pakistani border. not the Wagah Border, which is a performance of border, but a normal, ordinary, everyday stretch of border that cleaved panjab in the middle. the borderline that was created, arbitrarily, with no local input, overnight - resulting in the largest forced migration in human history. a migration that both sides of my family were forced to participate in, with over half of my relatives dying in one night.
not only did i want to see the border, to confront the physical reality of a thing whose myth and symbolism had determined the course of my entire life, but i also had two ziploc bags, one of which i hoped to fill with panjabi soil from the ‘indian side’ of the border, and the other with soil from the ‘pakistani side’. the soil, i figured, would be taken from essentially the same place and would, therefore, be the same. having both bags, isolated from each other and yet twins, felt important.
after asking around, i had a lead: my maternal grandmother’s next door neighbor, whose maiden name is Kahlon, and who is like an aunt to me, told me that her puji lived in a village bisected by the border. she had been meaning to see her anyway, and we could take a trip if i wanted.
we rented a car, which, as we made stops and more relatives and acquaintances joined us, became a caravan of three cars, packed with people going to the village for little reason other than curiosity at my strange request. when we finally arrived (after having chai and snacks and every house that we stopped at along the way), we walked through the village, which, because of its proximity to the border, had evaded the industrialization and modernization that was spreading across the Panjabi countryside. it was like the panjab i remembered visiting in my youth. a sleepy village with buffalo wandering freely and children riding on dirt roads with old bikes.
after another round of tea and snacks (naturally), we walked the the northern end of the village, where the border fence was located. we walked through sugarcane fields and forest along a wide dirth path flanked on both sides by beautiful, arching trees. birds chirped and flew overhead. a site of so much geopolitical violence was, on the ground, peaceful and serene.
as we walked along the fence, i noticed fields of crops and what looked like another fence, far in the distance, so small i could barely see it. the local family explained to me that, between the pakistani side of punjab and the indian side was a large swath of land that the governments had designated as a Demilitarized Zone. i stopped in my tracks. i thought about the ziploc bags in my purse. empty of soil. i thought about what i had pictured for months: squatting in the grass, my bare hand clutching one fistful of earth, and then reaching through the fence, grabbing another.
as i looked at the distance between here and there, as i looked at the soldiers who stood, rifles slung over their shoulders, watching us, and the large black object that was my field recorder in my hand, suspiciously, i realized how silly my dream had been. how unprepared for the reality of the actual border i was. even if there had been no DMZ, there was no way these soldiers were going to let me close enough to the fence to reach through. of course not.
on the walk back to the village, i felt dejected, but i wondered - how was the land between the two fences so well maintained? one of the local grandmother’s explained that, when they built the fences, several farmers’ land was bisected and designated as part of the DMZ. rather than buying the land from the farmers’, the two governments came up with a system where, for two hours a day, farmers from the Indian side of Panjab would be allowed to go through the fence and work their land, and for another two hours, farmers from the Pakistani side would be allowed to do the same.
i thought about this. this dance. this on the ground diplomacy, and the reality of needing crops managed, food harvested, livelihoods cared for. i thought about the soldiers with their rifles, the large black gate - it’s appearance of infallibility. of permanency. and i thought about how porous, how unfixed, this border space was, despite what the mythology of empire might want us to believe.
after this trip, when i went back to my studio in Providence, i encountered a blank wall where a sculpture used to be. i had presented the sculpture at my last critique of the semester, and had, as was my custom, destroyed it. the only thing that remained of it was the tape marks that i had used to deliniate its size and general shape. i thought about this absence, this echo, this remnant. that was the beginning of this body of work, which i actually have no good photographs of. but given this context, that feels apt, if frustrating.
artist statement:
this work is about dichotomies and separation, about what it means to be in many but of no place, about history and legacy -- but most of all, this work is about yearning. about pasts that have lost themselves to time, to swift colonial escape, to the sudden and complete silence that only comes from sudden generational death. about a multitude of futures that cannot ever become. and what it means to sit in diaspora and to want and crave a thing without knowing what that thing is.
because i cannot remember the things that i never had a chance to know, and i cannot put together a puzzle that is made of pieces i do not have -- a puzzle that assembles itself into an image i would not recognize, because i have never seen its possibility before.
this work is made to feel like a living, breathing, shifting thing. because this unlearning to learn, and unknowing to know -- is living, breathing, and shifting inside me in ways i cannot anticipate or put words to. i only feel it.
and i hope the honesty of my searching and unknowing feels like a palpable thing a viewer could hold. because my experience, this sensation, is not unique. it is, sadly, so many of ours to share. and i hope we can sit with it, here, in the quiet of this room, with this work’s embrace of its precarity and incompleteness -- its recognition of its own insufficiency as an archival object -- and know that maybe we, in our flawed unbelonging and unknowing diasporic selves, are also enough.
curatorial statement (by chieko phillips):
Satpreet Kahlon uses cultural tradition to articulate moments that are more authentic to her lived experience. She is part of the
Punjabi diaspora after the 1947 Partition of India, which divided the region of Punjab between India and Pakistan. Kahlon’s family, along with hundreds of thousands of other Punjabi residents, were forcibly removed from their homes and ancestral land based
on their religion.
The bholiyan heard in this gallery are traditionally sung by woman dancing giddha, a punjabi folk dance. In Satpreet Kahlon’s installation, giddha represents the loss of ancestral memory that comes with forced migration. In her installation, she fills that void as she explores the process of
recovering this memory while on a recent trip to Punjab.