Partition and Postmemory in the Work of Kriti Arora and Sharlene Bamboat
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines personal memory and inter- and transgenerational transmission, employing postmemory as a key interpretative lens to analyze the media work of New Delhi-based artist Kriti Arora’s five-minute silent film THIS or THAT? Or NEITHER? (2005) and Toronto-based artist Sharlene Bamboat’s And Memory (tentative title, 2011–in-progress). These artworks explore family histories associated with the artists’ great-grandfathers before and after the 1947 partitioning of the Indian subcontinent. This thesis argues that Arora and Bamboat’s artworks employ postmemorial aesthetics that speak to the complexity of navigating between the traumatic histories that the artists inherited and their own lived experiences, which are occupied by the transmitted knowledge. Furthermore, these autobiographical works substantially bring instances of historical trauma into the present to comment on how it continues to affect individuals generationally removed. In addition to Arora and Bamboat, over the last sixteen years, a number of artists such as Indian artist Nalini Malani, Pakistani artist Rashid Rana and Toronto-based artist Sarindar Dhaliwal, all of whom grew up during and after decolonization and nation-building, have negotiated the effects of Partition within their personal histories and have made artworks that focus on historical trauma and cultural memory relating to Partition, as well as the contemporary realities of Indo-Pakistani hostilities. This thesis contributes to emerging research on the effects that Partition has had and continues to have on the practices of contemporary artists of South Asian descent.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".