Schwules Museum Berlin
Sweetmeet Shindook
/ sculpture /
/ Schwules Museum Berlin : 2025 /
/ with Nippun Bhalla /
/ concrete, silicone, metal /
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Untitled Sculpture for Sweetmeet Shindook
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Shindook is an Urdu-Hindi-Bangla word for a treasure chest, describing decorative heirloom trunks that are quintessential in South Asian households, as personal object archives of a population that has survived historic migration and refugeehood through Partition, wars and socio-political upheavals across highly militarized and hostile national borders. Trunks are often passed on to next generations by womenfolk, and contain prized possessions, personal journals, archives of marginalized identities and their survival.
Thinking through this object-archive of the Shindook, the Sweetmeet Network in both the countries have participated in co-creating two travelling shindooks, composite archives of personal artworks, that are sent as gifts to the network in the other country as an exhibition. Each of the two Shindooks carry deeply personal artistic works that reflect the hopes, dreams, struggles and joys of the diverse queer communities that the artists are a part of in both Bangladesh and Germany.
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Curators: Tanvir Alim, Promona Sengupta