Listen to Syma Tariq‘s audio essay featured in The Contemporary Journal’s special issue Sonic Continuum.
Partitioned Listening 001: ‘You trust your memories?’
Voices, as artefacts of the historical event of Partition,[1] carry multiple worlds. The first of a two-part audio-essay takes Partition as a sonic environment in which silence, fiction and intimacy reverberate. Between personal testimony and public history emerges a partial tale: the British destruction of its colonial record across its empire, starting with a fire in Delhi in 1947.[2]
The Contemporary Journal is an open-access and digital-first publishing platform developed and edited by Nottingham Contemporary’s Public Programmes and Research. Special issue ‘Sonic Continuum’ (Mar 2020 – Nov 2021) traces practices of world-making through sound, both as a force that constitutes the world and a medium for producing knowledge about it.
Read more about Syma’s PhD research with CRiSAP – ‘Listening across history: Partition, coloniality and the oral archive’