About
Rituparna Rana is an artist, curator and scholar working with South-Asian Migration and migrant narratives. She is based in Berlin, Germany and is originally from Delhi, India. Her work is primarily based on concepts of ‘home’, ‘homeland’, ‘sense of belonging’, ‘memory’ and ‘nostalgia’. She works with narratives collected from South-Asian Migrants and exhibits how story-telling and the process of narrativization can be part of accepting the process of migration and healing the pain and sense of loss that comes along with it. She works with different generations of migrants to depict how migration is not a singular event but rather its aftermath is carried on through inter-generational transference of oral histories.‘Migration’ for her is much more than the mere physical phenomenon of moving from one place to another. It is a part of one’s identity, of how one describes oneself in relation to another, and how one is perceived by the other as well. Migration is an unavoidable and rather admirable reality of today’s world. No one is anymore from one singular space or grows up with one singular ethnic or regional community. There is a regional or ethic cosmopolitanism taking place where almost everyone is in constant dialogue with the ‘other’. She feels this is a world where escaping migration in some form or the other is close to impossible. Therefore, her vision is to create a space for the artistic productions and scholarly researches that depict the narratives of Migration specifically from South-Asia. She has worked with multiple artists and has curated multi-media exhibitions in India, Europe and the United States of America.
Bio
Rituparna Rana is a Marie-curie fellow and joint-doctoral candidate within the MOVES program associated with the University of Paul-Valery, Montpellier and the Freeie University, Berlin. Her research explores topics related to the 1947 partition, postcolonial and partition studies, migration, memory, identity and belonging. Her doctoral research focuses upon the analysis of the testimonies and oral narratives collected from the 2nd and 3rd generation 1947 partition migrants whose previous generation crossed the borders of West Bengal in India and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The artistic projects focus on the linguistic strategies of healing, reclamation and negotiation in migrants and how the intergenerational narratives of migration imbibe the experiences of the trauma, pain and sense of loss. She is a trained Oral Historian with the 1947 Partition Archive, California, and has collected actual oral accounts of the migrants who witnessed the 1947 India-Pakistan Partition. She is a co-convener of a research and creative collaboration of the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Minnesota, ‘Memory, Movement, Montage’. She is also a curator and design strategist associated with Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (State Library Berlin), where she curates a virtual migration exhibition in collaboration with South-Asian artists, researchers and scholars.
