REVIEW Mar 2025 What Does Peace Mean to You? at The Peace Museum, Bradford

Charu Vallabhbhai

Independent curator and writer Charu Vallabhbhai visited The Peace Museum in Bradford to explore commissions by the institution of interactive works by Lakhbir Sangha, originally as part of the museum’s 2017 Partition exhibition. Following is her review of this and more recent works made specially for the move to a new location at Saltaire.  

The Peace Museum Bradford relocated in August 2024 to its new home within Salts Mill in Saltaire, a former industrial village and World Heritage Site that lies less than four miles north of central Bradford in West Yorkshire on the River Aire and Leeds Liverpool Canal. To mark the reopening, artist Lakhbir Sangha was commissioned to produce four new artworks in a collaborative project with The Peace Museum for the exhibition ‘What Does Peace Mean to You?’. Sangha, who lives and works in West Yorkshire, first trained as a dentist before graduating in fine art at Goldsmiths, University of London followed by a Master of Fine Arts at Leeds University.

Funded by The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, ‘What Does Peace Mean to You?’ invites participation by the museum’s visitors as well as its audiences online, in artworks that have been created to intentionally encourage physical interaction. The Peace Museum has built on its pre-existing relationship with Sangha who had first developed an artwork for the museum collection that, back in 2017, commemorated the 70th anniversary of Indian independence from British rule.

The work, entitled Displacement (2017), was made in response to an open call by The Peace Museum. It brings into focus the tragic price paid by many Indians in 1947 when their country was split to form the separate states of India and Pakistan, a process formally known as Partition. Pakistan itself was divided across two areas that were 1,240 miles apart. The nation now recognised as Pakistan is situated north west of India while the area that became East Pakistan in 1947 would later, in 1971, become Bangladesh. The later independence of Bangladesh recognised that the majority group, being Bengali, had different cultures and languages to those in Pakistan, although they shared Islam as their religion. This distinction itself is an indicator of a far greater complexity that the act of Partition ignored.

The Partition of India in 1947 resulted in mass upheaval and violence. With millions of the country’s citizens forced to leave their homes and relocate to states designated for Hindu or Muslim people, it is estimated that one million people were killed. At that time the population of India was approximately 25 percent Muslim. The other 75 percent was mostly Hindu, then Sikh and Buddhist as well as other religions. Communities were divided as Muslims fled to Pakistan while Hindus and Sikhs felt pressurised to migrate to India.

Making Displacement offered Sangha the opportunity to draw attention to the experiences of those who lived through Indian Partition and witnessed the horror of it, including her own mother who was a child in Indian Punjab at the time. The artwork captures personal stories of an elderly group of people invited by Sangha to share their memories of the resulting turmoil of Partition. Sangha points out that this elderly population had never previously been asked to discuss the subject, because Partition wasn’t something that was ever talked about. For her it felt important that these memories were documented so their voices will remain heard. Sangha reached out initially through her own family networks to identify elderly individuals to participate and then also visited temples and religious groups established from the Indian diaspora in different parts of England. As many participants were illiterate or had become unable to write, their verbal recollections were written down by Sangha as well as individuals assisting with the project. They were then transferred onto the scrolls that comprise Displacement.

The artwork presents a resin outline of a map of pre-Partition India that is filled with scrolls of Indian fabric. Each individual scroll bears a handwritten memory of the displacement of people and the violence resulting from forced segregation drawn along religious lines. Sangha was inspired to present these stories as scrolls after becoming interested in Victorian promise boxes that were developed to share bible verses that had been written by hand onto paper. In Displacement the scrolls are richly coloured strips of Indian textile that represent the subject and its participants, while forming a vibrant honeycomb like pattern within the cavity of the map of India. Visitors to the museum are invited to actively engage with the contents of the map by pulling out scrolls and reading the stories they hold. For Sangha it is immensely important that the personal experiences from Partition are shared with the public and thereby learning and knowledge encouraged. Displacement is on permanent display at the Peace Museum, and can be seen alongside Sangha’s more recently commissioned artworks.

What Does Peace Mean to You? Bradford (2024) is a sister piece to Displacement that has been on display at The Peace Museum since its reopening exhibition at Salts Mill. It is an artwork that is developing through community and audience participation. Where Displacement was entirely completed and filled with scrolls before display, for What Does Peace Mean to You? Bradford a resin outline of the district of Bradford is in the process of having scrolls added. Sangha and The Peace Museum are inviting individuals to respond to the question and share their thoughts about what peace means them.

Sangha decided to make this artwork specific to Bradford in the choice of materials. She bought garments from charity shops in the city as well as making donations to them for scraps of fabric they could not sell. These have been used by Sangha to produce the scrolls. The artist has also collaborated with Bevan Healthcare Centre located in Bradford’s inner city, working together with the practice to invite participation from its patients. The centre offers healthcare services for homeless individuals, refugees and asylum seekers in the community. For Sangha it was  essential to make a work that is inclusive and involves marginalised people as well as the museum’s visitors. This also provided her with the opportunity to have fabric scrolls with written responses about the meaning of peace already prepared to fill some of the empty space in the resin outline when it was first displayed.

Another commission Sangha completed for The Peace Museum’s opening event at Salts Mill is Going Green (2024). This is an intricately hand-knitted sculpture in yarn that takes the form of a dress. It was worn by a model for a performance at the launch event, during which the audience were encouraged to physically interact with it. The invitation was to touch and feel the garment as well as beginning to unravelling it from its end which was made into a long train. In Going Green Sangha continues the intentions and explorations of an earlier body of work, ‘Close-knit Circle’, created in 2018.

The artworks that comprised ‘Close-knit Circle’ were vibrantly coloured, large abstract sculptures that Sangha hand-knitted, investing both skills and hours in time to make. These static forms were created to be brought to life through audience interaction in a process of unmaking. Invited to entirely unravel the sculptures, each one is transformed into a large ball of yarn. This intentional act of sculpture sabotage was in the blueprint of their making, considered by Sangha as a quiet rebellion that challenges the practices of commodifying and preserving art.

Sangha’s knitted works have demanded intense labour and craftsmanship and Going Green would not be out of place on a cat-walk as a couture garment. This highly accomplished ability to knit is one that developed from Sangha’s early childhood. She was taught by her grandmother and mother who were both illiterate. This resulted in the knitting process being one that she absorbed and retained through observation and memory, with no reference to a knitting pattern. Fostering a free-form approach to knitting, Sangha developed the ability to adapt and make a garment fit, as well as creating through exploration. She much later taught herself to knit from patterns and considers her wider artistic practice being informed and born out of a fusion of her Asian heritage and her upbringing in England.

In Going Green Sangha addresses our relationship with nature and the urgency to commit to green policies, aiming to steer us away from climate disaster. In a plea to make peace with the planet, she addresses ecological concerns. The unravelling of nature’s garment can be interpreted as man’s destructive interventions towards nature’s plan, disrupting natural systems that had once been in harmony. Sangha also comments on the throw-away cultures of the current and the last century, referencing the fashion industry’s harmful environmental impact through mass clothing manufacture which has generated overwhelming levels of consumption. Here, the unmaking of the garment to form a re-usable ball of wool puts emphasis on alternative models to fast fashion, demonstrating how re-use and recycling of materials and clothing could reduce textile wastage. Sangha once again draws on the home skills she learnt growing up in the making of Transitioning Home (2024).

The subject of displacement and homelessness is revisited in Transitioning Home, a wearable artwork that Sangha has developed from two identical tents, upcycled to form an outfit. The structure of one tent is retained to make a full-length pyramid shaped skirt with tent-poles and apex adjusted to create the waist. The second tent has been re-shaped entirely into an anorak. Sangha recalls learning to sew from her mother and older sister when she was a teenager living at home in Birmingham. They would make new clothes by unpicking the stitches of existing old garments that fitted. These would provide a flat template to cut new cloth that would then be sewn to make clothes in three-dimensional form. Sangha describes developing her confidence in handling textile and fabric to adapt it into the image she held in her mind of what she wanted to make. She later worked in her first paid job on an industrial sewing machine at a sewing factory. For Sangha, the domestic setting as a place of learning, from one generation to the next, has been invaluable.  

At The Peace Museum, interaction with Transitioning Home is encouraged by inviting the museum visitors to consider and reflect on what home means to them. Squares of fabric are available for the responses to be written down or drawn and pinned to the skirt of the outfit, which is displayed on a mannequin. Transitioning Home reminds us that everyone needs a space where they feel safe and ‘at home’ but that so many people, across the globe, are forced to take temporary shelter. People are made homeless by different crises, including contemporary conflict or displacement and here in the UK because of the shortage in affordable housing. This artwork, in presenting the tent as home, also evokes the many over-crowded refugee camps occupied by people made to evacuate the places and communities they once called home.

While we rely heavily in media reports to make these situations known, in Awakening (2024) Sangha contemplates the distractions that our devices and uninterrupted access to social media and the internet make from achieving inner peace. The final commission to be completed by Sangha for exhibition at The Peace Museum, Awakening, comprises a plywood box in which honey-scented tapered candles are presented for the museum visitors to take away. The artist considers the act of gifting a significant and powerful gesture that, in her own experience, has provoked deeper engagement. In offering a candle or light, which can be considered a universal symbol of truth and clarity, Sangha shares her own wishes for illumination during our current times of political turmoil.

‘What Does Peace Mean to You?’ is a thought-provoking exhibition comprised of artworks that Sangha has carefully crafted to encourage engagement with themes that are currently the biggest issues of our time. For this review Sangha was asked to respond to what peace and home mean to her:

“HOME is a place one wishes to be, where you can be yourself in all entirety.”

“PEACE is the complete acceptance of otherness and then working towards integration with respect and love.”

The memento of a candle, that can be taken away from the museum and lit at another time and in a different place, perhaps one that is quieter, could provide a moment to re-contemplate the meanings of peace and awakening.