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Hindustan Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
The thing is...: Wknd interviews Selim Khandakar, an unusual collector of everyday objects
Many have hobbies. Some have obsessions. What Selim Khandakar feels is a pure, unbridled desire for objects. Just before a cyclone hit his mud house in Kelepara village in the Hooghly district of West Bengal in 2021, Khandakar spent hours checking on his collection, tucking hundreds of things — perfume bottles, transistor radios, gas stoves, toy cars, pens, plastic dolls, lighters, bead necklaces, miniature paintings, old newspapers, letters, cigarette boxes, albums of stamps and coins — into crevices and corners, desperate to keep them safe. (Most did survive the storm.) He has amassed over 12,000 items over 50 years. Some (broken crockery and coins) date to the Mughal era. Others (ticket stubs and stamps) are from a few decades ago. Each is precious to him, he says. Each item once served an important purpose; care went into making it. It's an unusual way to curate a museum, but an informal museum is what Khandakar has put together. Parts of his collection have now made it to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, as part of a tribute to the fleeting nature of so many of the objects that make up human history. The exhibit was put together by his niece, Ohida Khandakar, 31, an artist. Her installation consists of assorted items from his collection, and an 18-minute short film on her uncle's unusual journey, titled Dream Your Museum. The film recently just won the Victoria and Albert Museum's prestigious Jameel Prize for contemporary art, an award only handed out every three years. *** 'The film and installation… challenge the traditional authority of conventional museums,' Tristram Hunt, V&A director and chair of the Jameel Prize judging panel, said in a statement. This is perhaps what is most interesting about Khandakar's horde: the way in which it reimagines the ideas of 'collection' and 'museum', ideas typically defined by power, status and wealth. What Khandakar has ended up doing, with his vast collection, is creating a record of the common person's life and times. In highlighting his work, Ohida's film now raises the question: What defines our existing museums, and who are they for? 'Collecting is my way of showing people from my village a glimpse of things from around the world,' Khandakar says. 'Like rare coins from the Mughal era or vintage perfume bottles. Often people here do not get a chance to go to cities to see such things. Bridging that gap is what has always kept me going.' It all started, for him, in 1973. He was 23 years old, working as a compounder at a clinic and living alone in Calcutta, when he wandered into Park Circus Maidan one day. 'There, I saw people showcasing their stamp collections and I was fascinated,' he says. After that day, he began to collect too. In the evenings, when his friends were sipping tea at a market adda, he began to walk around Chowringhee, Park Street and Mullick Bazar. He saw how shopkeepers treasured their objects, he says. He began to collect trunks full of bric-a-brac: some found, some given to him, some bought from general stores, antique stores and curio shops. Every weekend, he lugged a trunk full of these items back to his village, where he displayed them in his courtyard on Sundays. Now 75, with a pacemaker helping regulate his heartbeat after two heart attacks, he is still collecting. 'Sometimes I dream that I'm picking up coins from the road, or I'm at an old bookstore where someone has dumped an old book and I'm eager to place a price on it. It's like collecting is in my DNA,' he says. Over time, he toured other collections, including those at Kolkata's Victoria Memorial Hall museum and the Birla Industrial & Technological Museum. Marble Palace, an 1835 mansion, exquisitely preserved, became a beloved haunt. It resonated with his love for how we once lived. 'Such a collection will never exist again. No matter how wealthy or powerful you may be today, these objects simply aren't available,' he says. It is this joy of preserving a physical object that once represented utility, luxury, history or the spirit of human ingenuity that has driven his collection. As he says, with pride, there aren't many other places today where one can find some of the earliest rupee coins minted, with the permission of the Nawab of Bengal, by the British East India Company. *** How close is he to having an actual museum of his own? Ohida is currently working on a feature-length film on her uncle, and plans to help him digitally archive his collection, as well as showcase it better on-site. He is happy to have her help in this. 'I love these objects. I don't ever feel like parting with them. But Ohida understands them,' he says. Ohida admits she didn't always. 'Growing up, the art books and catalogues in my uncle's collection fascinated me, with their pictures of artefacts from the British Museum, and prints of works by Rabindranath Tagore,' she says. As an adult, though, the randomness of the collection baffled her. When the pandemic struck and she returned home for a while, 'I would see him cleaning a broken antique plate or some other item. One day, I asked him, 'Why do you keep it all?',' she recalls. His answer struck her: 'Are you, an artist, really asking me this?'' Even in the absence of a museum, a museum has always existed in her uncle's mind. She has grown to understand this. 'People will start to look around, and each person is struck by something different,' he says. 'They ask me where I got a particular thing and I tell them about the places in Kolkata or elsewhere. I tell them about exhibitions, fairs, museums, places that people in the village haven't been to.' 'I want to spark curiosity in the people around me,' he adds. 'How will they appreciate new things if nobody ever shows them any?'
New European
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Rebuilding Palmyra, brick by electronic brick
She has used that imagination using 3D models and film to 'recreate' the city, much of which was reduced to rubble by Islamic State barbarians, as her entry for the latest edition of the Jameel Prize, Moving Images . The show is at London's V&A until March 16 before heading to Bradford as part of the city's year of culture. Syrian artist Jawa El Khashʼs The Upper Side of the Sky . Photo: V&A Museum Above: a piece from Ramin Rokni Hesamʼs If I had two paths, I would choose a third (2020) which documents the toppling of political statues in the Middle East – from the 1953 military coup in Iran to the start of the Iraq war in 2003. Photo: V&A Museum A work from Sadik Kwaish Alfrajiʼs A Thread of Light Between My Motherʼs Fingers and Heaven . Photo: V&A Museum The abiding sensibility among the seven finalists is that of longing and loss, a cleaving to history and tradition, which is hardly surprising given that most of them have fled the turmoil and repression of their homelands for countries where they can express themselves freely. Khandakar Ohida, one who does live and work in her home country of India, took the £25,000 prize with her film Dream Your Museum (2022), an endearing installation about her uncle's collection of memorabilia which had lain hidden in trunks for 50 years. Khash's entry, The Upper Side of the Sky , could hardly be more different. Her virtual reality evocation of Palmyra is rendered in haunting shades of blue which beguile the viewers as they use a console to 'walk' through courtyards and towering arches. But, inspired by her grandfather, an agriculturalist of renown, she has softened the outlines of her virtual city which she once described as having the 'harshness of modernism and brutalist architecture' by decorating the stones with flowers, trees and shrubs. Butterflies take wing, seeds are ready to ripen. 'During the process of creating it, I was thinking about the ancient historical context of the monuments at the time they were being lived in, what each building was being used for. Simultaneously I was creating a record for future generations to be able to revisit Palmyra, even though it had been completely destroyed, through the sense of optimism and surrealism.' If Khash deploys sophisticated techniques to express her feelings, Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, an Iraqi living in the Netherlands, expresses his with animated charcoal drawings. Simpler but just as heartfelt. He conjures memories of growing up in Baghdad with A Short Story in the Eyes of Hope (2023), an animated love story to his father whose life was one of poverty and struggle. A commentary is scrawled alongside the increasingly careworn face of his father and superimposed on the outlines of a map of the Baghdad streets which he would tramp in search of work. Traditional burial prayers accompany the words which begin: 'Born in the south in the land of water in the city of reeds he played with buffalo and listened to love songs' and ends with the painfully succinct: 'He was born, he worked and he died.' His other contribution, A Thread of Light Between My Mother's Fingers and Heaven (2023), is a more complex work with imagery springing from his mother's open palm. Gardens bloom with trees and flowers, which turn into eyes that slip out of sight to be replaced by the mythological creature Buraq, which carried the Prophet to the heavens and, incongruously, a copy of Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper . 'I grew up with it hanging on a wall at home,' explains Alfraji. 'It was always in my life. It makes me happy to see it, the pure beauty of it when we ate. It reminds me of the food mother gave us. 'But it's not just nostalgia. By dealing with my own experience and memory I believe I can express a kind of a global experience. People will not necessarily know why the Last Supper is included but I invite them to dig into their own memories, their own emotions and daily lives and find something relate to.' Alfraji admits that after two decades of living in the Netherlands, returning to Iraq only twice because his mother was dying, he is still uncertain where he really belongs. This insecurity is not a problem affecting the high-profile trio of Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian, Iranian artists who quit the restrictions of Tehran for the freedoms of Dubai in 2009. Their entry for the prize is the most flamboyant of them all, a video-cum-painting, If I had two paths, I would choose a third (2020), which dramatises the role of iconoclasm by setting it against key moments in Middle Eastern history from the 1953 coup d'etat in Iran to the start of the Iraq war of 2003 – all the more timely given the toppling of the statues of the Assad family. Using their process of fluid painting, they took news footage of these events, printed out 3,000 individual pieces of paper on which they superimposed painted interpretation and transformed the composition into video. They took inspiration from the Aja'ib al-Makhluqat ( The Wonders of Creation ), a 13th-century text on cosmography and summoned up the spirit of the djinn, the spectre from Arabic mythology which is unseen by humans and able to assume any form. This mix of fact and fantasy finds expression in riotous street scenes peopled by monstrous creations; men with horns, gaping mouths and serpentine heads. A many-breasted female stands on top of a tank surrounded by men, heads painted in red rectangles, a man looms out of the crowd, his face painted in yellow and black stripes like a parrot. The statue of Saddam Hussein is wrenched ignominiously from the ground, his head a blob of red. For all the embrace of the region's myths and traditions, the trio have no desire to return to Iran. Not for these self-styled 'people of the desert' the longing that characterises the works of Alfaji and Khash. 'We never tried to become nostalgic about the past or what happened,' they say. 'We try to look at what is happening in the world now. You could even live in your own country and still be in exile.' While they remain in their creative oasis, Jawa El Khash yearns to return to her homeland. 'I am hopeful for a future with serious culture, serious museums, galleries, artists and thinkers living without fear. 'I'm looking forward to being a part of that generation that helps rebuild Syria into the country that we've always wanted it to be and to be able to freely grow as artists and as thinkers.' Moving Images is at the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, London until March 16 Richard Holledge writes about the visual arts for the Wall Street Journal, Gulf News, Financial Times and the New European
