Memory Box: Voices of Migration and Border Crossing

About this event

Led by Farzana Qureshi (SOAS Arts and Humanities Librarian) and Saadia Gardezi (Journalist and Political Cartoonist and founder of Project Dastaan) this session will be an open mic event, where a panel of speakers will share stories of migrant journeys across the globe. Translated through images, diaries, poetry, objects, and oral and written testimonies, we will find out more about how memories shape who we are and how they connect to identity.

The Memory Box is specially designed for the festival drawing from the ongoing exhibition on Narratives of Refugee Memories in the SOAS Library curated by Sanjukta Ghosh in the Wolfson Gallery that looks beyond the political event of Partition, building on the conceptual category of ' dispersed diasporic communities '.

Memory Box Participants

Audience members are requested to share their stories and fragments relating to their childhood memories, migration, partition, taking new journeys and more. Memories connect us to our family, friends, past and present. They are able to recount trauma, sadness, happiness and laughter. They are a sense of belonging and security and shed light on where we came from.

Farzana will be talking about memories connected to a family book written by her Uncle about his everyday life in India and will touch on his travels to Pakistan post-partition. She will also speak about memories documented in an interview conducted with a partition survivor who is now 86 and who made the difficult journey in 1947 from Rawalpindi to New Delhi.

Other panellists like Pragya Dhital (British Academy) discuss how the little magazines by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra are aide-memoirs of Bombay before it became Mumbai, and Allahabad before it became Prayograj.
Interdisciplinary Artist | Speaker | Author | Activist Jonah Batambuze, the founder of the Blindian project talks about his African experience and personal connections with India.

Dr Aditi Kumar (Warwick) speaks about her research on visual arts in relation to refugee memories.

Faraan Irfan, the founder & CEO of Saarey, who continues a 63 year family legacy of patronage of Pakistani classical music, will briefly recount a memorable episode exploring the journey of Pakistani classical music post-partition.

Registration

Click here to register

Other attactions of the Festival

Viewers of this free program can join the SOAS SAHM Festival Finale when speeches are in the Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre at 5:50 pm by Prof Andrea Cornwall (Outgoing Pro-Director, Research and Enterprise), Khadir Meer (Chief Operating Officer at SOAS), Oliver Urquhart Irvine (Director of SOAS Library) (TBC) among others.

To buy tickets for the 16 July Festival Networking Reception, please click here . The reception ticket also includes refreshments for some select events over two days.

Organisers : The Festival is co-directed by Sanjukta Ghosh (SSAI) and Farzana Qureshi (SOAS Library) and supported by the Students Union, SOAS Library, SOAS Research and Enterprise. The festival is in partnership with South Asian Heritage Month, the well-known month-long celebration in the United Kingdom (similar in spirit to Black History Month and other awareness months). The SOAS SAHM is in collaboration with Jasvir Singh OBE and Dr Binita Kane along with the wider team.

Contact email: ssai@soas.ac.uk