The Pak Khawateen Painting Club proposes a museum on Partition that never takes off. Complexities arising as a result of Partition are often whitewashed and represent a blind spot in history, with the generation who experienced the enormity of the event slowly dying away.

Like many government schemes that commence with good intentions and are often sugar-coated with populist beliefs and panegyric praise, the Partition Museum is fated to be lost in the annals of history when it becomes imbricated with the bureaucracy and paper pushing that often characterises the officialdom of many post-colonial nations. Corruption, embezzlement and frustrating delays often result in projects being shelved. The production, circulation and accumulation of paper containing requests, permissions, sarkari jargon and remonstrations embody the kafkaesque routes these paper trails take on as they flit from department to department.

In this satirical re-enactment of pompous governmental rituality we mimic the protocols, official language and tropes of the “ sarkar”/establishment. The Pak Khawateen Painting Club become mediators between the governmentality of the State and its coded language as their Project becomes entangled in meaningless, winding chains of correspondence. In this narrative, banal correspondence becomes entangled with ideology, culture, agendas and political point scoring; the white elephant ultimately prevails.