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producing cuturally diverse exhibitions
Sarindar Dhaliwal: Record Keeping Dates John Hansard Gallery Southampton 11 May—19 June 2004 Oriel Mostyn Gallery Llandudno 22 January—5 March 2005 Canada House Gallery London 1 April—24 June 2005 Agnes Etherington Art Centre Kingston Ontario 25 September—18 November 2005 Sarindar Dhaliwal and I gradually became aware of each other and our work through the 1990s. As artists and cultural producers who were both born in India and are Canadian citizens, perhaps this was inevitable. Dhaliwal grew up and returned to art school in England, before establishing a base in Kingston, Ontario and then Toronto. I grew up partly in Canada before coming to art school in England and then remaining here to carry on my practice based in London. During the 1980s, England experienced the Black Arts movement, an offshoot of the highly politicised Anti Racist Movement of the 1970s. This was a powerful response to a white Englishness that had painted all difference with one brush. By the end of 1980s this was fragmenting into multiculturalism and identity politics, as each ethnic group sought to define its own specificity as a means of seeking and sustaining further funding. At the beginning of the 1990s a notion of internationalism crept into what was the Black Arts scene, bringing with it an appreciation that globalisation had arrived in the arts and that it was important to know what was happening internationally and that similar struggles were being waged elsewhere. In the last two years, OVA had a remit to research South Asian artists as the political climate changed once again towards diversity. This seemed like a good moment to show Dhaliwal’s work, as not only was there a substantial body of work by now, but also she has refrained in her work from the assimilationist Together with our concurrent project, ‘Roshini Kempadoo’, this exhibition raises the continuing need to profile Diasporic women artists who have roots in several continents, who don’t sit comfortably in their host societies and who question the assumptions made about them and their work and its cultural references. In doing so, they also raise the increasingly apparent notion of the heterogeneity of the Indian identity, which itself has been caught up over the last fifty years in a nationalist postcolonial moment, only now coming to terms with the effects of globalisation. Sunil Gupta RELATED: Archive |
