A divided existence: Reena Saini talks about her exhibition 'Hyphenated Lives'

In Hypenated Lives, your work involves creating a dialogue between symbols of partition with the barbed wire as a recurring motif to indicate countries joined at the hip to evolve into a hybrid whole. The works accompany press clippings to record instances like Israeli protests to change the name of the Palestinian sun bird or detaining of a pigeon suspected to have flown from Pakistan.
In this exhibition, I felt the need to turn to species other than the human race to tell us how to share the planet, where the existence of one species depends on the other or the disappearance of one affects the other adversely. I look at electric cables as transmitters, conduits of contact or carriers of information meant for bringing people together but morphing into barbed wires and fences. Several works in the exhibition point to politically partitioned countries that often have to share their natural resources, that are the root cause of contestation and conflict and, on occasion, even the very cause for the separation of the countries.
Also, a lot of the early imagery post-partition was based on long-lost twins. So, in Siamese Trees and Half Oxygen, I entwine the banyan tree and the deodar tree that are the national trees of India and Pakistan [on life-size embroidery rings]. As if putting forth an analogy between the human body and nature, in Half Oxygen these national trees permeate lungs, while in Anatomy of Distance the woven wires become a spinal column to resemble the 'Line of Control' (LoC) between the two warring nations.

These wires emanate the sounds of a river (Indus) and the beating of a heart to reflect the partitioning of these waters in the 60s though both nations still use it as a source of water. On a personal level, what is the fascination with borders, barbed wires and conjoined national symbols?
The memory of flying over the LoC has stayed with me since 2001. It is a chilling experience when the pilot announces you can see the lights marking the border on the ground. Like viewing an incision dividing two nations. I grew up listening to my father and his brother on their pre-partition experience of moving out of Lahore and the sudden shift in relationships between communities. So, this exhibition is a reflection on differing world views, their coexistence and the gaps that are left for interpretation. It makes inquiries into our ideas of independence and interdependence and the means we adopt to attain them, which are often self-destructive and can come at the cost of our own needs.

Saline Notations (Echoes), your ongoing project of creating textual pieces in salt on the beach, must be such a challenge. How is it working with the fragility of constantly changing parameters?
For this exhibit, [a six-part photopiece realized on the beach], tidal calendars, sunset timings have become my collaborators. It took me a while to understand the amount of time I had to create the salt texts before it submerged with the rising tides. Then, the monsoons are cloudy with not enough light, occasionally strong winds and in the evenings there are cricket balls flying over my head. But this is exactly what the work is about, to reflect our fragile relationship with the natural environment.

What were the other challenges you faced while putting up Hyphenated Lives?
As I like to have backups, I had obsessively created pieces for the show but many were edited out because of space. For Anatomy of Distance/Half Oxygen, there were days we finished just four lines of embroidering the wires as it involves having them nailed, wound, looped and knotted. For the hybrid forms, it took me a year and a half of researching on the species and collating press clippings. But, it is truly fulfilling when all the works come together in the same space for new relationships and interventions.