The Citizens Archive of Pakistan, an organisation dedicated to cultural and historic preservation, was commissioned by British Council to put together a multimedia exhibition at Alchemy 2014. The exhibition, designed and curated by British curator, Onkar Kular and Karachi based journalist, Sanam Maher, revisited stories from 1947 and attempted to map their relevance to Pakistani identity today.
The show examined what it meant to build a new nation through memories and personal narratives captured in this revisiting of history, allowed for reflection on individual experiences of partition.
In addition, a schools day event organized by the South Bank Centre brought hundreds of school children to experience the Partition narrative from a South Asian perspective. Onkar Kular commented, “The narrative of Partition within the UK feels very much historically marginalised and underrepresented. Importantly, there is very little representation of the history of Partition within school curricula. My nine year old daughter knew nothing about this event. The presentation within the Royal Festival Hall of CAPs archive around the Partition felt like the perfect opportunity to shift towards a more represented balance of this history”.