Untitled (Banya)

Memory plays a role more important than often ascribed to it in the shaping of individuals, and artists are no exception. Ganesh Haloi, who migrated as a youngster in 1947 across artificial borders drawn on the subcontinent, created this work out of memory, of a flood (Banya) he had witnessed as a young boy when growing up in Mymensingh that would be a part of Pakistan between 1947 and ’71, and of Bangladesh from then on. Two vivid vignettes recreated are in the form of a woman’s shadow and a frame of a door with ruins of a house behind it, in what is a surrealist, washed landscape