Avni Sethi, an interdisciplinary practitioner working between culture, memory, space, and the body, is the 2020-2022 Jane Lombard Prize recipient, nominated by Akansha Rastogi, for her project Conflictorium for the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice Prize and is part of the Vera List Center’s As for Protocols cycle of programs.

Founded in 2013 as both a physical site in an area of Ahmedabad with a largely marginalized population, Conflictorium is also a conceptual project that centers conflict as integral to life and peace. At once a museum, an artistic and activist project, and a methodology for dealing with conflict, artistic responsibility, and social justice, Conflictorium chronicles many of the riots, disagreements, and clashes that have occurred in Gujarat since the founding of the state, and archives them on scrolls that are bound and then locked into cabinets. 

This archive, together with various art installations and workshops, serves as resource in processes of reconciliation, arbitration, and conflict resolution that often transcend the local political conditions and offers protocols for reconciliation that can be replicated elsewhere. The museum and the space for dialogue it creates, engage every section of society, with discordant understandings of conflict and issues by celebrating plurality and encouraging the expression of conflict in artistic and creative ways. 

Cartographic Anxieties opened on March 14, 2020 at the Conflictorium, a little before the country went into lockdown. The show asks some fundamental questions on borders, their constructions, their crossings and futility..If cartographic anxieties are loosely accepted as the anxieties of the state when subject to cartographic aggression of the other, one has to delve into how this aggression is reflected in the everyday life of the people. The recent spurt of blatant violence across the country is also the result of systematically programmed incursions upon the oppressed which continues every day. The genocidal violence which becomes news at a chosen hour by the powers has always been a daily reality hidden under the carpet of peace between communities in conflict.

“In a blatantly polarized ‘new India,’ Conflictorium’s presence and continuance in Ahmedabad is a huge act of bravery and remembrance.”
Akansha Rastogi, Jane Lombard Prize Council