Virtual Reality Installation
2024-25

Combining virtual reality, creative writing, photography and performance, this immersive installation embodies a “lost” space from the psychogeographical exploration of the India-Bangladesh conflicted border historic landscape, its impact on transgenerational memory and trauma. It offers a multisensory experience of my personal and transgenerational experience with multiple migrations, border conflict and being “the other” in a space. The protagonist of this speculative universe, a boatwoman, acts as my avatar; you are guided by her/my voice. The aesthetic of this world combines greyscale with the colour purple, achieving a diffused dream-like effect, with layers of aquarelle textures and echoes, and surreal elements such as a hand-painted sky and cultural relics in the river sediment.
In the VR film, the viewer/participant embody a character in a boat cruising down a fictitious river. The riverine landscape is a reference to the over fifty transboundary rivers shared between the two countries, a metaphor for the fluidity of culture, history and migrant movements across this forced artificial colonial border. This was the path of migration my family took during the India-Pakistan wars.
The installation space is engulfed in a giant fishing net at the centre of which is placed a boat that the viewer/participant steps into to wear the headset and experience the VR film. The net carries various “relics” of this imagined universe, symbolising what has been dredged from the bottom of this flowing river of memories. This is combined with purple light and an ambient soundscape to further create an immersive atmosphere. As a performative aspect, I am physically in the space dressed as the boatwoman protagonist figure to welcome and introduce the viewer/participant to this fictionalised universe. The boatwoman is a symbol of Durga, the drowned goddess of strength, another co-cultural metaphor, a representation of the silenced female figure reclaiming space and power.