Choreographic gestures seem trivial: a low budget home video (2022).
Two channel HD digital video projection, 15 minutes 29 seconds, colour, sound, looped, installed with mayian ingredients for whiteness.
Nominated for the Ingram Prize 2022.
Documenting a generation of British-Indians still trying to locate themselves joining England’s “nation face”, intimacies between Punjabi and white working-class culture in Britain are imagined. Rituals only ever performed in the homeland are re-performed in a stereotypical Anglo-Indian home in Birmingham. Deliberately “low budget” the not knowing, the opacity, the untranslatability of living on the threshold of a culture that has always been just out of reach is captured. The cinematic conversation is opened to include the nuances of brown and white passing experience in a mixed-race (Great) Britannia. Through formal and conceptual juxtaposition, the work presents a complex and shifting relationship between histories of miscegenation, the immigrant identity, brown-white love, and how and what we choose to memorialise.
Nominated for the Ingram Prize 2022.
Documenting a generation of British-Indians still trying to locate themselves joining England’s “nation face”, intimacies between Punjabi and white working-class culture in Britain are imagined. Rituals only ever performed in the homeland are re-performed in a stereotypical Anglo-Indian home in Birmingham. Deliberately “low budget” the not knowing, the opacity, the untranslatability of living on the threshold of a culture that has always been just out of reach is captured. The cinematic conversation is opened to include the nuances of brown and white passing experience in a mixed-race (Great) Britannia. Through formal and conceptual juxtaposition, the work presents a complex and shifting relationship between histories of miscegenation, the immigrant identity, brown-white love, and how and what we choose to memorialise.
Enough of this “bhak bhak", let’s get on with the show (2022).
Video, 17 minutes 40 seconds, colour, sound, looped, installed on a 9.7” reconditioned CCTV Surveillance monitor.
Video, 17 minutes 40 seconds, colour, sound, looped, installed on a 9.7” reconditioned CCTV Surveillance monitor.
As a recreation of the “revealing of the bride’s fairness” part of Mayian, the work functions as the final scene, interrogating the fetishism of relocating ritual in a Western institutional space. The issues of cultural (mis)translation, mimicry and retrieval are explored as traumatic symptoms of the diaspora, whilst the ontology of the digitised South Asian body is renegotiated on a disused CCTV surveillance monitor. Different versions of Punjabi to English translations held over-the-phone capture how colonial violence is imposed on individuals refusing to take on a new language. The work thus strategically refuses these attempted translations, shifting semantics in each iteration. The viewer entering at different points in its screening is left uncertain which translation, if any, to trust. The license to watch, use and take from others is questioned. Through such inversions, it reminds the viewer of the asymmetry in social power between the migrant and their “host”.
Photographs courtesy of Emily Seagrove.