How do we articulate what we unconsciously know? Eep eep ṭap ma—translated from Lamkang into English as “sleep sleep don’t cry”—was a refrain from a lullaby that Thamshangpha Maku’s mother used to soothe him as a child. This longing for solace persists through forces that return from the past, reminding us that the present is still produced by its historical relations. The borderland is a condition that Maku inhabits both as physical territory—as someone born into the margins of the nation state—and also one that afflicts his interior order. An experience marked by perennial occupation from different underground and counter insurgent pressures informs his varied understanding of violence that manifests in the body. A story from his childhood that recurs in conversation narrates the urgency imposed on the everyday—the memory of having to practice eating fast before the meal gets interrupted by gunshots.
His practice becomes the site where the excesses of terror in the form of homesickness, melancholy, and a certain sense of haunting begin to make themselves known. For Maku, this phantasmatic matter extends beyond the body and seeps into the ecology of a custodian community, where women weavers have been translating elements of nature on the loom into abstract motifs. These non-representational methods of rendering, passed down intergenerationally through oral instruction, find themselves as leitmotifs that give shape to that which arrives concealed, that which is not easily resolvable, and that which refuses to be effable. Inheriting the knowledge of an intricate basket weaving practice, he has expanded his skilled dexterity into other traditional forms of making—wood carvings, different methods of weaving and stitching. He tends to these enigmatic studies through attentive education in literature, community, forests, ritual and forms.
Curators, Anna Sireiliu Charenamei and Sohorpem Kazingmei
This exhibition shares a mourning that asks for a reckoning. A reckoning of moral responsibility towards an entire region that is often stereotyped, carelessly, casually, and cruelly, as the North East. For those standing here, like me, who are far removed from the lived experiences of Manipur, this is an invitation into that reckoning filled with poetry, prose, and a pause.
Phantasms is that pause.
Here, Merci has created an archive of lived experience centering the community from the inside out, whilst being clear that one person cannot and doesn’t represent a community in its entirety. Historically and in contemporary times, these attempts of self-determination have been denied, fabricated, colonised and silenced. Whilst this history remains erased from textbooks or disallowed from being in them, Time will always remember our silence about it.
Curatorial Advisor, Shaleen Wadhwana