Events & Entertainment

Sirius Arts Exhibition: Bindu Mehra -The Inaccessible Narrative

Published

1 year ago

January 11, 2024

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Bindu Mehra is a London-based artist whose practice examines colonialist acts of silencing and erasure in the context of the 1947 Partition of India. The film The Inaccessible Narrative (2023) investigates the legacies of British rule on the Indian subcontinent through the lens of intergenerational trauma, particularly the silencing of Indian women’s identities. This exhibition is the film’s premiere and the first presentation of Mehra’s work in Ireland.

The Inaccessible Narrative was commissioned by SIRIUS. This exhibition is produced by SIRIUS and curated by Miguel Amado, Director, with Georgia Perkins, Curatorial Fellow.

Bindu Mehra, The Inaccessible Narrative (still), 2023. Courtesy of the artist

Bindu Mehra produces films that engage with the enduring legacies of British imperialism through personal records and archival footage, using lived experience to enact an alternative collective memory that disrupts official discourses. Along the way, Mehra also criticises the rhetoric of Western feminists who persist in assuming their position is dominant when considering geopolitical contexts other than their own.

The Inaccessible Narrative (2023) examines the notion of home – an ostensible place of stability and belonging that can in actuality be a site of insecurity and impermanence. It speaks to loss through forced displacement, as a home can be subject to its own scars and risk of destruction when politics, mass movements of people, and border disputes are involved.

The film takes the form of an address, interposed with vocal pauses and gaps, thus identifying Mehra’s difficulties in creating an autobiographical account as well as speaking of her own family’s migrant circumstances. For instance she asks: ‘What is free will? What was the justification?’ – each question being met with the word ‘silence’, pointing to an inability to answer.