Studio for Memory Politics

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Voices from an Archived Silence – Transoceanic Exchanges

A research and exhibition project on archives-in-the-making in Colombo and Karachi.

Research: December 2023 - January 2025

Presentation in Karachi: January 28 – February 14, 2025
Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture
Presentation in Colombo: February 27 – March 5, 2025
Studio Kayamai

Curatorial team: → Sandev Handy → Vera Ryser → Aziz Sohail → Angela Wittwer

Curatorial support Karachi: Abeeha Hussain
Production support Colombo: Nishantha Hettiarachichi, Sonia Rajendran

Supported by: The Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

Voices from an Archived Silence – Transoceanic Exchanges (2023–2025) is a collaborative project by Studio for Memory Politics that aims to explore and address silences in cultural memory in the postcolonial geographies of Colombo and Karachi. The project brings together four artists – Sophia Balagamwala and Veera Rustomji from Karachi and Hema Shironi Joseph and Firi Rahman from Colombo in a transoceanic dialogue to confront silences, erasures, and gaps in cultural memory within their distinct contexts.

The project examines how archives-in-the-making – often oral, fragmented, or disappearing – can enable new ways of understanding histories of displacement, migration, and resilience. Over a year-long research phase, the participating artists engaged with local archives – ranging from family photographs, recipes, institutional collections, and community-driven archives – to explore how memory is preserved and transformed across geographies.

Over the past year, the artists have been engaged in a transoceanic discussion with each other. These dialogues were facilitated by the Studio over the course of 2024 through regular meetings, fostering an exchange of ideas that bridge personal and collective narratives. The outputs include presentations in 2025 in Karachi and the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture Gallery and in Colombo at artist-run Studio Kayamai, where artists present their research as artworks and programming that interrogate historical narratives and propose alternative ways of remembering. The multi-city presentations of Voices from an Archived Silence – Transoceanic Exchanges speak to one another, reflecting both the connections between our histories and the gulf and ruptures in North-South exchanges.

Voices from an Archived Silence – Transoceanic Exchanges builds on → Voices from an Archived Silence (2018–2020) which actively confronted the silences and implicit power structures of Swiss colonial archives and was aiming to explore a polycentric exhibition-making practice with artistic voices from Switzerland as well as from source communities.

SOPHIA BALAGAMWALA
Karachi

FIRI RAHMAN
Colombo

VEERA RUSTOMJI
Karachi

HEMA SHIRONI JOSEPH
Colombo

Artist Talk by Aziz Sohail with Sophia Balagamwala and Veera Rustomji

Photo: Humayun Memon

IVS Gallery, 2025. Photo: Humayun Memon

Exhibition views Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi

Photo: Humayun Memon

IVS Gallery, 2025. Photo: Humayun Memon

Exhibition views Studio Kayamai, Colombo

Photo: Sujeewa De Silva

Studio Kayamai, 2025. Photo: Sujeewa De Silva

Sophia Balagamwala

Still from: Abujee and the Queen (2025)

Sophia Balagamwala delves into her family’s migration as Memons from Kathiawar region of Gujarat to Karachi in 1947, exploring personal archives of photographs, recipes, and anecdotes. Through two bodies of work, she reflects on kitchens as spaces of creativity, conflict, and care, and interrogates the intersections of migration, memory, and identity.

“For this project, I think through the archive of my family, who identify as Memons, a mercantile community, many of whom migrated from Kathiawar region of Gujarat to Karachi in 1947. The research has included looking through family photographs, letters, and diaries – often a multipurpose archive or recipes, receipts, lists and other memorabilia. From this research, two specific strands emerge.

One project looks at family recipes which were passed on in the kitchen from mothers teaching their daughters how to cook, many of which have not been written down, given that the language spoken by the community, Memoni, exists only in oral form. Many of these recipes include specific dishes like Khaosuey, originally from Myanmar, and now re-adapted to local tastes and popularised in Pakistan. These recipes act as archives of migration of this community and its movement under the British Empire. As I began to collect and transcribe recipes from family members and friends from the community, they were accompanied by stories which apart from food, were about relationships, rituals, traumas, joys and more. This resulted in Time in the Kitchen, a series of drawings and recipes that look at the kitchen as an extension of other spaces and spheres of life - home making, archiving, nourishing, parenting, creativity, expression, pride, conflict, expectation and exhaustion.

A second project is an animation Abujee and the Queen that merges truths and fictions from multiple oral histories and family archives to tell the story of a Memon migrant, who has a fascination for photography and history and reveres the Queen, speaking to relationships between Empire and postcolony and the way it still impacts communities today.”

Abujee and the Queen (2025)
IVS Gallery, 2025. Photo: Humayun Memon

Time in the Kitchen (2025)
IVS Gallery, 2025. Photo: Humayun Memon

Time in the Kitchen (2025)
Studio Kayamai, 2025. Photo: Sujeewa De Silva

Firi Rahman

Photo: Humayun Memon

Firi Rahman collaborates with the last Malay food vendor family in Slave Island, Colombo, using food as a storytelling tool. His project preserves recipes and conversations in Malay, archiving a fragile cultural heritage shaped by displacement.

"Despite my family's mixed ethnicity, Malay has remained the dominant language in our household, supported by strong first-language speakers. In multilingual Slave Island, Malay speakers often become trilingual through daily interactions with Tamil and Sinhalese communities. However, as development projects reshape the area, communities have been displaced, and aspects of Malay culture, including its well-known street food traditions, are disappearing. While Malay food in Sri Lanka reflects local influences – much like the language itself – its continuity is increasingly at risk as fewer families pass down traditional recipes. My research involves cooking and speaking with the last remaining Malay food vendor family in Slave Island. Through these conversations, recorded in Malay, I aim to document their recipes and, in doing so, reconnect with my own heritage."

Meja kayang (2024)
IVS Gallery, 2025. Photo: Humayun Memon

Papan pemotong (cutting board) 01–08
2025 Studio Kayamai, 2025. Photo: Sujeewa De Silva

Top shelve: Ashray Map series 01–05 (2022)
Lower shelve: Nene’s Recipe for Melayu Accharu (Malay pickle) recipe in Kadugu (mustard seed) bottle,
Rimza’s Recipe for Melayu Accharu (Malay pickle) recipe in goola botol (sugar bottle),
Datha’s Recipe for Melayu Accharu (Malay pickle) recipe in Chabey (chilli) and Bissar Chabey (capsicum) bottle,
Nona BB’s Recipe for Melayu Accharu (Malay pickle) recipe in storage bottle,
Maami’s Recipe for Melayu Accharu (Malay pickle) recipe in cuka (vinegar) bottle (all works: 2025)
Studio Kayamai, 2025. Photo: Sujeewa De Silva

Studio Kayamai, 2025. Photo: Sujeewa De Silva

Veera Rustomji:
Excerpts-vis-à-vis stillness from the library, 2025

Photo: Humayun Memon

Veera Rustomji examines the paradoxes of a Zoroastrian library in Karachi, situated between life and death yet shielded in isolation. Working with its multilingual collection, she creates prints that trace the archive’s materiality, questioning the implications of moving such private objects into public spaces.

“Eagles, termites, stray dogs and fat lizards—these are some of my companions leading up to, and within the library itself. A year-long interaction with a mass of printed materials at the Dastur Dr Dhalla x Young Mazdayasnian Zoroastrian Association Library, has made me realise how archives can live at the edges of non-human existence in stillness and isolation. With literature in languages ranging from old and new Gujarati, Farsi and even Pahlavi, the scripts and images among the library’s collection tell a story of community hierarchies, economical patronage and contention points of religious discourse. Since the library relocated to its current home in the early 2000s, its close proximity to centres of life and death has underscored a paradox: while it yearns to be heard and read, it also seeks to exist behind a protective shield. I have been documenting not only the content of specific publications, but moments, cracks and deteriorations within the space. This one-way relationship that I have had with the library is captured with prints, bringing copies or suggested insights of the library into a gallery space. Within this display and research in process, I consider the formalities and structure of the library and what it may mean for future custodians of this space to live without the resources that they have today.”

left: Navigating–Hormuz to Nargol (blue), right: Navigating–Hormuz to Nargol (black)
IVS Gallery, 2025. Photo: Humayun Memon

left: Rivayat’s Description of the dakhma in Old Gujarati 01, right: Rivayat’s Description of the dakhma in Old Gujarati 02
IVS Gallery, 2025. Photo: Humayun Memon

left: View of Arkayim, Ural Region, Hamazor 01 (green), right: View of Arkayim, Ural Region, Hamazor 02
IVS Gallery, 2025. Photo: Humayun Memon

left: Discourses by Godrej Sidhwa (black), right: Discourses by Godrej Sidhwa (green)
IVS Gallery, 2025. Photo: Humayun Memon

Navigating–Hormuz to Nargol (blue)
Photo: Humayun Memon

Rivayat’s Description of the dakhma in Old Gujarati 01
Photo: Humayun Memon

View of Arkayim, Ural Region, Hamazor 02
Photo: Humayun Memon

Discourses by Godrej Sidhwa (green)
Photo: Humayun Memon

IVS Gallery, 2025. Photo: Humayun Memon

Old Girls Association–Sanjan Stambh (black)
Photo: Humayun Memon

The Cherag! Ajmalgadh Monument (navy, purple and pink)
Photo: Humayun Memon

left table, left: Old Girls Association–Sanjan Stambh (black), right: Old Girls Association–Sanjan Stambh (navy)
right table, left: The Cherag! Ajmalgadh Monument (navy, purple and pink), right: The Cherag! Ajmalgadh Monument (black)
IVS Gallery, 2025. Photo: Humayun Memon

Studio Kayamai, 2025. Photo: Sujeewa De Silva

Hema Shironi Joseph

Photo: Humayun Memon

Hema Shironi Joseph reimagines the kambali, a woollen blanket brought by indentured South Indian labourers, as a living archive. Through mixed-media works, she layers colonial-era imagery of women plantation workers onto reinterpreted kambali, interrogating how plantation histories are visualised and remembered.

My research explores the Tea Plantation Workers’ Museum and Archive in Gampola housed in a century-old line room made up of rows of 12x12 ft smaller rooms. Among the objects in the museum archive, I was particularly drawn to a display of a single piece of kambali. Likely brought by or given to an indentured labourer from Tamil Nadu, the kambali was both a practical item, providing warmth and protection against the cold and rain, and a symbol of continuity often passed down across generations. The kambali’s presence in the archive reflected the transnational lineages and collective histories of the Malaiyaha Tamil community, to which I belong. However, the blanket’s solitary presentation and the sparse information that is available about it, served as a stark reminder of the broader silences that surround this community’s stories. My project goes in search of the histories tied to the kambali and reimagines it as a living object, exploring what it might carry today if the kambali itself or its story had continued to be passed down through generations.