Memory in artist Arpita Akhanda's work is never abstract. It is string, paint, flesh, and breath — present in the warp and weft of paper weaving, shadow on a photograph, and pulse in performance. Her work does not merely observe history; it remembers it from within, taking recourse to preserve family records, family trauma, and the leftover trace of the Partition of 1947.

“For me, the idea or memory is the core — the seed from which my work germinates,” Arpita shares. “Each work begins with a performative act... and from there a combination of personal narrative, instinct, and material relevance determines the medium.”

Akhanda, born in 1992 and raised in an artist clan that migrated from Bangladesh to Cuttack, Odisha, has evolved a deeply personal yet politically engaged practice. Trained at Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati University — an institution born out of the philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore — her overarching artistic vision is evident in every single one of her works.

“Rather than focusing on what leads me to choose a medium, I am more interested in how it evolves into a tangible or intangible form — how a personal journey unfolds into a language that resonates with the collective memory." she adds.

A winner of the 2025 Sovereign Asian Art Prize for the 'Dendritic Data Ib', an introspective paper weaving of self and memory, Akhanda has received international acclaim for examining the body as a "collector of memories". The concept — in which the human form is a zone of post-memorial remaking — weaves in and out of her multi-disciplinary practice, embracing performance, photography, drawing, installation, and video. Her work frequently confuses the boundary between personal and collective; solid and transient, body and document.

“Winning the Sovereign Asian Art Prize was an unbelievable moment,” she says. “It is both an affirmation and a reminder that personal narratives hold an important place in the global space. It was moving to see such an intimate exploration resonate beyond its origins, reaffirming that the personal is never isolated — it transcends borders.”

At the center of her work is a scrupulous process: excavating family archives — diaries, telegrams, photographs, oral histories — kept over generations. One such moving moment came through a photo taken by her grandfather in 1946, on the eve of departing their ancestral village in Srikail. That single photo, and a diary entry mapping the coordinates of the village, led to a journey decades later when Akhanda was with her father at the exact spot, following geography as memory. The photo became evidence of the notion that the past no longer fleeting.

This dialogue between personal testimony and the erasures of institutional history drives Akhanda's urgency. Her delicate but disjointed paper weavings represent the fractured nature of inherited memory. The pixelated forms remind one of digital errors and the fallibility of memory, and her performances often have the tension of being a witness to something that's just out of reach.

From her haunting piece, '360 Minutes of Requiem' at the India Art Fair to her poignant solo show, 'Körper: The Memory Collector' in Switzerland, Akhanda's visual vocabulary is ever-expanding. Every work, whether two-dimensional or three-dimensional, dissolves back to a universal longing, preserving what is on the brink of being lost.

“As an Indian artist working across different social and geographical spaces, I am constantly negotiating how my cultural context informs my practice while ensuring it does not just confine me,” she explains. “It’s possible to stay rooted while expanding our branches — embracing new experiences without losing one’s foundation.”

Living and working between India and global residencies — from Rome to Kyoto — her presence across the conetemporary art landscape grows every single day. Yet even as she rises on the global circuit, her work remains small-scale and close to home.

“Through my practice, I try to bring personal spaces into conversations that are globally relatable,” Arpita reflects. “By expanding personal histories, I aim to create spaces where these complexities are recognized and understood, both within and beyond cultural origins.”

Her recent win at the Sovereign Asian Art Prize is a personal triumph, yes — but it is also a moment for Indian contemporary art, particularly artists in the eastern region of India, to be seen, heard, and felt across the globe. As Emami Art's Richa Agarwal put it, "Arpita's achievement is not merely an individual milestone but a testament to the limitless possibilities awaiting artists committed to breaking artistic and conceptual boundaries."

In Arpita Akhanda's performance, memory isn't one eternally stuck in the past. It is alive and breath-taking material that's constantly retold and re-performed. And in each movement of remembering, we are invited to look again — nearer, deeper, and even more intently.

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