“Human memory is not a data storage; human memory is partial, contingent, malleable, contextual, erasable, fragile. It is prone to embellishment and error. It is designed to filter. It is designed to forget.” Audrey Watters.

Absence as an Artifact unfolds as a field of deferral and resonance. It does not seek to resolve absence but to think through it, reopening history as an unfinished terrain of violently interrupted relations. In this unfinished state, meanings, materials, and relationships remain unstable, shifting, and alive.

Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy, absence is approached not as negation or lack but as a condition of possibility. Presence is never self-contained; it emerges through what is deferred, displaced, or rendered invisible. Meaning does not arise from what is fully here but from what exceeds it.

Within this framework, I intend to read an archive not as a neutral repository of the past but as an active terrain of power. Every act of its preservation was also an act of selection; every gesture of protection carried the potential for exclusion. As if this archive determines what survives, how it appears, and who is permitted to approach it. It does not just store memory, it structures it.

This curatorial inquiry is informed by a specific and charged historical event: the lives of the Nowhere People of the Kaptai Reservoir in Rangamati, Bangladesh. Between 1959 and 1963, the construction of the Kaptai Hydroelectric Dam submerged 54,000 acre( 219 sqkm approx) area displacing nearly 100,000 people, and became long-term refugees in northeast India, particularly in present-day Arunachal Pradesh. Their villages, memories, and communities were erased beneath water, yet their lives persist through adaptation, resilience, and survival across generations.

In 2022, through the Leaky Archive fellowship programme, I encountered this colonial photographic archive collection of South Asia at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne. In its ethnographic section, I found 104 photographs of the Kaptai region, taken in 1927 by Julius Konietzko, a German explorer and trader with a focus on ethnology and folklore. His photographs were intended as spectral witnesses to a geography of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, with a commercial intent to monetize collected objects from the indigenous villages to museums in Hamburg and Leipzig.

The exhibition is designed not to reproduce these photographs as ethnographic evidence but as unstable traces, fragments suspended between what was, what is remembered, and what has been forcibly erased. They testify not only to what they show but also to what they exclude.

The absence of these displaced communities within the archival frame becomes a living material: a residue, a vibration, a gravity in the body; registers as hum, whisper, pause, forms of presence: ways of being with loss that refuse the demand for explanation. They mark a form of knowledge that is felt rather than seen, heard rather than translated.

Threaded through its thematic constellations—The Archive and the Repertoire; The Space of the Not-Yet; The Opacity of Grief: Listening to the Frequencies of Loss; The Body as Site: Cruelty, Hunger, and the Politics of Memory; and Listening to What Remains—the exhibition treats absence as a force that generates. These are not isolated chapters but overlapping fields where histories are revisited, identities unsettled, and futures rehearsed. This exhibition’s true value lies not in what it answers, but in what it leaves unresolved—opening space for possibility, for things to unfold or remain suspended.

Participating Artists
Tayeba Begum Lipi
Mahbubur Rahman
Dilara Begum Jolly
Naeem Mohaiem
Kiri Dalena
Dhali Al Mamoon
Kamruzzaman Shadhin
Molla Sagar
Prerana Khandelwal
Jayatu Chakma,
Riggi Nokre,
Pulak K Sarkar,
​Navid Hosnain,
Sabiha Ambareen Haque