Verso-Recto-Recto-Verso harks back to 1949, when the constitution of India was adopted by its newly independent citizens as a promise to themselves creating a nation where justice, liberty, equality and fraternity would prevail. Rendered on fabric scrolls using the tie-and-dye process are the preambles of the constitutions of India and its presumed opposite — Pakistan whose current constitution was adopted in 1972.

The artist’s act of erasure brings to sharp focus common grounds in the founding ideologies of the two countries, here revealed as gaps in two documents — one familiar and another perhaps (to an Indian viewer) unfamiliar. The inscrutability of the two renderings is a reminder of the collective amnesia of two sets of citizenries, resulting in a failure to understand and fight for the values upon which their nations were constituted.