Floating in Hindustan

Artist: Michal Glikson | Medium: Watercolour on paper | Size: 200cm x 30cm, sound component | Date completed: 2010

Artist Statement

My practice documents the complexity of crossing cultures between India, Pakistan and Australia through approaches that integrate anthropological research with storytelling. I sketch and draw as I travel, refining my imagery using techniques of Indian miniature painting. In Floating in Hindustan I mythologise entwining stories of ordinary/extraordinary people I meet in the politically polarised cultures of Gujarat, where I studied a Masters in Fine Art at the Baroda School, and Pakistani Punjab, where I studied Persian miniature painting. Floating in Hindustan was made over nine months, during which I crossed and re-crossed the Indo-Pakistan border. The work is thus a journal and testimony to my exposure to legacies of Partition, and to my sense that Australia, India and Pakistan are linked through the occupation and exploitation by the British Raj.