KMB Artist Bhasha Chakrabarti’s Installation a Document of Diaspora, Quilt-Making

KOCHI:
Musical strains of women singing kindle visitors’ curiosity as they approach the Director’s Bungalow of Aspinwall House, Fort Kochi, where the sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) has much to offer.

The music draws them upstairs to a room with night-like blue walls. Seven large quilts seem to float and vie for attention augmented by the seven paintings on the wall.

Honolulu-born KMB artist Bhasha Chakrabarti’s installation, Diaspora Transcriptions 2025, is layered with levels of meanings and metaphors as reflected in the suspended quilts and paintings of quilt makers. In tune with the title, the seven quilts speak of art, aesthetics, culture, and politics of quilt-making by the displaced and migrants, and these seem to connect seven continents, seven scales of music over seven days, time ticking on.

Each of the three layers of the quilt are a blend of patches of colours, patterns, and symbols, coming together irrespective of differences and similarities to offer comfort, protection and warmth from the past to present to future.

“Cloth which conceals and reveals the body is a medium close to my heart. I have been quilting from childhood which I learnt from my mother, a skill inherited. I made the quilts with my grandmother’s, mother’s, and my old clothes, layering them with thoughts, emotions, memories, maps, paintings, scripts, song lyrics, histories of migrations of Africans and their art that can be traced on the other side of each quilt,” said Bhasha showing a family photo; their outfits now adorning the quilts.

“Though the material is personal, the language is universal. It’s a site-specific work. I have stitched them in different parts of the world — Hawaii, Italy, Germany, India, New Haven and southern US —and put them together here,” she pointed out.

Her quest to explore more took her to Gee’s Bend in Alabama, known for the African-American traditions of quilt-making by the descendants of the enslaved in the cotton plantation of Joseph Gee set up in 1816. And to the quilt-making traditions of Siddhi women in Karnataka’s

Kalghatgi (Dharwad district), said to be of Bantu descent brought to India by the Portuguese.

“I learnt more about the art in the women’s company in Alabama and in India as they sang and quilted their heart out improvising each piece, strengthening bonds and sharing energies as they conversed. The missionaries taught them the basics after which they have been honing their skills. The quilts sought after as art and for use are soft, lasting, comforting, and warm and a symbol of strength and resistance as well,” said the artist.

“Quilting allows them to explore themselves and the outside world and gives them an identity.

They are my teachers, fascinating me with their improvisation, spontaneity, adding contextual elements in their visual compositions, always inspiring me. The quilt becomes a transcription, documentation of place, conversations, memory, songs that can be reactivated,” she said.

For Bhasha, mending is associated with clothing or things of personal use, extending even to relationships, sort of non-transactional and often delegated to women. “I see mending as a creative gesture that confronts fragility, vulnerability, and impermanence, reminders of contexts, hope and highlighting the feminine and the intimate. It’s an attempt to ponder over societal scars, wounds, darns, as transitional phases that lead to future without erasing the past,” she explained.

The paintings on wall are narratives on the quilt makers. “I made the paper from the pulp of the leftover material after quilting and captured quilting moments, of singing, sleeping beside the quilt, trying to thread a needle, with one end in mouth, veteran fingers stitching,” she said.

Bhasha has recorded the songs, singing along, in Alabama, Karnataka and Kochi as well as one can discern the ship’s horn in it too as if crossing the seas and the quilts seem floating creating histories.

“I chose the Bungalow bedroom to exhibit my work,” Bhasha said.

The songs lullaby viewers to relax, the quilts giving a cosy feel of a sound sleep as if conveying that rest and relaxation are as important as labour. The work is uplifting as it provokes thoughts of roles of women in society, their bond with nature, of repair and mending spurring dialogue around race, gender, and power.