BROWN / WHITE LOVE (2022-Present)
A letter to home written as photographs. Working through the lens of personal experience as a brown-white woman living in the diaspora, Sanghara exposes through images unseen narratives of love: interracial love, forbidden love, exiled love, grieving love. A love that sits between fiction and reality. Myth and ancestry. Nationalism and longing. Britain and other.
The images together serve to tell the artist’s story of England, as one of complication, loss, insurmountability and celebration.
“My identification as either white or brown will always be inauthentic. Passing for white is not a desire or strategy, but an assumed self-presence that lingers, an image that’s hard to shake. So, when making work about “brownness” - my brown histories and lineage - I fear I will be found out as a fraud, a cultural impostor, bearing the mark of mixed-race epidermal privilege that could - if I let it – wrongly place me as a knowing interface between India and Britain. My practice challenges this, advocating the other part of myself that is unseen, politicising identity as not a visually distinguishable authorisation.
Stripped, my work is rooted in a story of love. Interracial love. Forbidden love. Endorsing uneasy proximities to my “brown side” as a way to deal with the trauma of my mother’s exile – which has become my exile – all because she chose to run away with an English man. This dangerous cross-pollination of brown and white is embodied in me, the perfect metaphor for questioning power relations that pervade the art world, a space where work still needs to be done so brown can comfortably touch white.”
Stripped, my work is rooted in a story of love. Interracial love. Forbidden love. Endorsing uneasy proximities to my “brown side” as a way to deal with the trauma of my mother’s exile – which has become my exile – all because she chose to run away with an English man. This dangerous cross-pollination of brown and white is embodied in me, the perfect metaphor for questioning power relations that pervade the art world, a space where work still needs to be done so brown can comfortably touch white.”