Ali Akbar Mehta

Violence and its perception are an unstable and contestable phenomenon shaped by social and material factors – a fundamental condition ‘lodged in the core of human experience’. It is simultaneously private, public, self-intimating, and collective. Although trauma manifests as a physical, emotional and psychological bodily sensation, its measurability, locus and description remain ambivalent. As an intangible concept, trauma is thus difficult to define, as it ‘has no referential content,’ and resists objectification in language. Since the experience and interpretation of pain is highly subjective, its representation translates invariably between individuals, societies and cultures. Its depiction or its narration then, has the potential to serve many symbolic and metonymic functions: as a document, a record, a vision, a fact, a possibility; which can be judged, critiqued, and understood within the context of its presentation.

Though my research based practice, I attempt to understand how the narrative experience of Violence, Trauma and Pain are embodied, embedded and extended in the contexts of these meanings. I find ways to confront the potency of a (post) conflict space in its basic vocabulary – to ensure narratives are not erased or rendered invisible.