I was 16 years old when religious conflict between Hindus and Muslims took place in my city in the year 2002. The Gujarat riots was one of the most photographed events of human catastrophe in the recent history of India. Newspapers, magazines and live television news were incessantly proliferating images of human misery during that time.
Feb. 27th, 2002 and the following months, I used to cut newspaper images and keep them in a file as an archive of events that happened around me. I didn't know what I was doing then. Coming back to Ahmedabad after finishing my graduate studies in fine arts, I found those clippings from my home in 2017. I started writing new text and by putting that directly on those clippings, I wanted to use it as a means to understand past events. I wanted to reevaluate the event of the past and try to interpret it after 15 years. What can we make of it in retrospect ?
I believe as a society we must learn to acknowledge unpleasant moments from our History. By acknowledging, we are giving ourselves a privilege to learn from History. Such terrible events have been etched forever in our collective memory but it is our duty to make peace with it and make sure we never repeat our mistakes in future.
