A preoccupation with migratory patterns and the inevitable straddling of cultures is pronounced in the works of South Asian-American Diaspora artists over the past few decades. Now, a younger generation of artists like Mala Iqbal, Maryam Jafri, Gautam Kansara, Fawad Khan and Samanta Batra Mehta explore a breadth of media from video art to watercolor and collage to mine autobiographical experiences. Their journeys overlap in A Place of Their Own. By placing their diverse practices alongside one another, the subtle tensions, internal forces and psychological impetuses that are the principle drivers of an immigrant experience, jostle for attention. However, these artists are not itinerants; for the duration of this exhibition, they have an address. A Place of Their Own provides a venue for a critical dialogue about their work.
Mala Iqbal paints luminous landscapes that are as subtle and dazzling as they are foreboding and desolate. Paintings like Picnic are utterly uncanny, confounding the viewer with strange occurrences while flirting with seduction. An internal dysfunction is apparent; human beings make appearances, but they seem hopelessly out of place. The disjuncture between person and place creates a profound dystopia.
Fawad Khan draws upon personal experiences of oppressive military cultures and depicts brilliant explosions of vintage and foreign-model automotive vehicles in large-format works on paper and installations. We are left to view violent displays, but not as bloody events but as elegiac, transformations that seem almost choreographed. Although celebratory on first impression, these explosions reveal an underlying fragmentation.
Samanta Batra Mehta uses antiquarian illustration, drawing, maps and photography to collage a world that centralizes a feminist rhetoric amid mythical dramas that suggest a post-colonial condition. In The Last of the Uncolonized Lands, a subdued female protagonist (a stand in for Mehta?) invites our voyeurism. Both her virginal garb and her passive demeanor, mark out her body as a potential site for violent acts.
Gautam Kansara creates poignant video installations that focus on the subtle dynamic shifts of family life and the impact of aging on his grandparents. Even though works like I’m Leaving are intimately familiar with an Indian subject, Kansara’s experience of India has been filtered through his grandparents who lived in London. By subjecting himself to their eccentricities, he becomes a deliberate recipient of their generational experiences.
Maryam Jafri tells stories through video installations that combine influences as eclectic as Victorian era literature, Western art history and costume design to create theatrical worlds that linger on the precipice of memory. Bizarre characters inhabit her cinematic worlds; they speak in self-conscious tongues and often wax philosophical on the role of cultural identity and the shaping of the individual consciousness.
