Artist Statement

What Absence Cannot Say (a Fragile Grammar) explores the spectral residues of colonial violence through memory, language, and archival silence. Drawing from the artist’s personal experiences of linguistic loss, familial displacement, and cultural erasure, the project examines memory’s inherent imperfection and how colonial legacies continue to shape identity. The artist’s loss of Urdu and Multani reflects broader historical erasures, prompting meditation on how such absences articulate themselves. Jacques Derrida frames “hauntology” as both presence and refusal, troubling linear narratives and destabilising neat historical resolutions. His theory of  “archival fever” highlights the violence inherent in archival practices—each act of preservation is simultaneously an act of suppression, leaving deliberate gaps or “archival silences” that obscure entire lives, perspectives, and languages. Through a speculative installation using linguistic fragments and layered sound, the work straddles legibility and opacity, where opacity reveals complex meanings that evade straightforward interpretation, inviting viewers into spaces of untranslatability. Language here is never neutral; its fractures unveil deep personal and collective histories marked by loss. Derrida’s  trouble de l’archive—the tension between public memory and private forgetting—becomes palpable as the work holds space for silenced voices and erased stories.