Amaanat (Inheritance)

Curated by Nirmal Raja

In Urdu, Amaanat translates to "inheritance" or a very special belonging handed down from one generation to the next.

Nirmal Raja is a Somerville-based interdisciplinary artist whose work is greatly inspired by objects and the stories they hold. She sees them as silent witnesses to our lives. Some are intimate and personal, while others relate to our connections with one another. Some bear witness to history, while others are remnants of a lovely or painful experience.
Poet Elif Shafak describes this phenomenon: "We carve our dreams into objects large and small. The emotions we hold but fail to honor, we try to express through the things we pass on, trusting that they will outlive us when we are gone, trusting that they will carry something of us through the layers of time, like water seeping through rocks. It is our way of saying to the next generations, those we will never get to meet, 'Remember us'."

At the heart of Amaanat is an intentional conversation between Raja's sculptural works and curated objects selected from the Somerville Museum collections. By placing contemporary artwork in direct dialogue with local historical artifacts and objects collected from the community, Raja uncovers unexpected resonances. She teases out common threads, and relationships between her own artistic explorations of material culture and the tangible memories preserved by the community. Together, they investigate how objects convey cultural nuances, familial histories, and the profound impact of migration on human memory.

The Amaanat Archive
Complementing the physical gallery display is the Amaanat Archive (www.amaanatarchive.com), an associated digital archive dedicated to collecting crowdsourced immigrant stories revolving around personal objects. An immigrant's relationship to material possessions is uniquely layered—shaped by whether an individual fled under duress or made the deliberate choice to seek a new home. The objects carried across borders and handed down across generations carry extraordinary stories of resilience, loss, and continuity.

Amaanat invites ongoing participation from community members. To share an object-based story, get involved, or learn more about submission guidelines, please contact Nirmal Raja at nirmalinbetween@gmail.com.

Read an interview with Nirmal in the Somerville Times:

Nirmal Raja: A Somerville artist who archives beloved objects from immigrants

Read an earlier article about Nirmal Raja in the Boston Art Review:

Nirmal Raja’s Interdisciplinary Practice Maps South Asian Memory Across Materials