“Rajat Dey’s work emerges from the anxiety of not knowing what must be wholly remembered. Taking root in the disintegrations of modern subcontinental history, Scissors and Glue draws on its intersections with the artist’s personal narrative. The series highlights how Dey’s family as well as his old house came to be fragmented and demolished in stages, eventually leading to his family’s exile from East Pakistan.

The project attempts to recover the loss of a cohesive past with creative acts of screening, superimposing, cutting and pasting. The work of memory is used as a reconstructive tool against the broken, unstable ground of history in order to engage with the narrative of an emergent, new life. Recalling the playful and nostalgic form of collage, Dey’s constructions attempt to paper over the traumatic and fragmented dimensions of the past with fantasies of belonging. The artist does so in order to foreground a visible, habitable world. His images evoke the fullness of such worlds as they appear formally to our eyes, but the bodies of these visions are hollowed out—like empty suitcases or rusty, abandoned almirahs. They are unable to promise that vital substance for securing fantasies: a holistic myth of origins that can anchor a familial identity to a place and time.” -PIX