Sonal’s documentary oriented installation Box Full of Someone Else’s Memories engages with the absent and the bereaved by dislocating the remained presences in the abandoned houses of Kashmiri Pandits. She visited some of the houses standing out as ruins in the midst of densely populated areas of the old city called downtown and collected whatever she could find lying untouched in the cob-webbed darkness of the rooms. By means of her intervention, she turned the empty houses into a site of excavation unearthing the relics pregnant with references, associations, memories and histories. After giving a certain archeological-oriented arrangement to the ‘found’ things she displayed her collection in one of the residency studios. Her workspace created an aura of a public museum where the viewer was left alone to encounter an assortment of socio-political narratives.

A protective gesture to negotiate with someone else’s memories is explicitly obvious in Sona l’s handling of the found things. The viewer is tempted to indulge into the empirical existence of the house owner by encountering the newspapers and magazines, some of the them placed in the rust-ridden tin-trunk with its open lid and some scattered around, exerting a new visibility of the dates, images and the text, the empty bottles of medicine, notebooks with children’s drawings. Everything is laminated in transparent plastic sheets and labelled with captions with a clinical care, creating an atmosphere of
a forensic lab where the specimens have to go through legal/medical investigation.

Laminated and annotated, the specimens anticipate an experience of transit to negotiate different spaces like an archeological excavation, or a public space of information and a medical/legal investigation.
Sonal’s collected leftovers are supplemented with sound recordings of local people, mostly neighbours of the displaced, making a reference to the immediate and the nostalgia of communal brotherhood. The installation as a testimony picks the very moment of the fear-ridden hasty decision by which the homes were rendered homeless, like a parchment inscribed with the marks on the skin of time and memory.