PAPER TXT MSGS FROM KASHMIR by Alana Hunt

Softcover with cloth spine
Photocopies of the original artist book 
Self Published
English and Urdu
173 pages

This edition is a xerox version of the original book (no longer available for sale) made at the University stationery shop where the artist studied.

In the winter of December 2009 close to a thousand “paper txt
msgs” were distributed throughout the Kashmir valley. It was a tongue in-cheek response to the government’s ban on pre-paid mobile phone services in the region, when virtually overnight hundreds of thousands of mobile phone users – people conducting business, college students, families, distanced lovers were left without means of telecommunication. There was little more than a whisper from the media. This was not an isolated incident. The monitoring, blocking and banning of phone services is just one of the many ways in which India’s occupation intervenes into, disrupts and desecrates the rhythms of daily life in Kashmir.


Through the distribution of an “alternative tool of communication” frustrated pre-paid subscribers were invited to write a “paper-txt-msg”, to anyone real or imagined, about anything they would like to write in a txt msg but were suddenly unable to do so.
What is central to this work is not only the paper txt msgs, the video, the book—but, everything that lies between these things. It is the thoughts that were probed, the discussions that were generated and the ideas and feelings that have been voiced.

Across Kashmir, India and Pakistan media outlets began to speak, through these hand-written paper txt msgs, on issues they had previously been silent on.

The publication also contains a collection of writing from Kashmir by Suvaid Yaseen, Majid Maqbool, Zooni Tickoo, Iram Razzaq, Rahim Seab, Gowhar Fazili, Uzma Falak and Tanveer Ahmed.