Archive of Imagined Citizenship (2017)

The ‘Archive of Imagined Citizenship’ was developed as part of the Dara Shikoh Fellowship ’16 and is my attempt to address the story of Kashmir through the fictional village 100km south of Schkupadale which, like Kashmir, exists entirely in my imagination. It is presented as a colonial era natural history museum and positions the artist as a European natural historian who ordered the natural world from his armchair, taxonomised and taxidermised birds and animals from the colonies based on sketches without ever encountering them.

This particular series of 19 frames titled ‘Collection of Specimens’ − 18 of which are humanesque portraits of Jammu, Ladakhi, and Kashmiri wildlife− is done in the miniature style and format used in the courts by emperors and persons of repute, to draw attention to the varying degrees of threat to these species while also adhering to the iconoclasm of many of the arts of Kashmir.

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