“Light Body ~ Water Body”
Mandeep Singh
17 Aug → 28 Sept 2024
Mandeep Singh presents a new commission in the West Space Window as part of To Forever Ebb and Flow: Queer Time/Migrant Time.
Light Body ~ Water Body connects the natural landscapes of bodies of water, such as rivers and creeks, to ancestral bodies, with the recognition that one’s own body exists as an altar to our ancestors.
An image of Mandeep’s friend (or dost) and fellow South Asian artist and collaborator, Parminder Kaur Bhandal shimmers in the sunlight, resembling an enlightened body and soul, honouring traditional Sikh painting. Parminder moves between being both seen/unseen and belonging/un-belonging. In traditional Sikh and Punjabi ritual, water has an immense capacity to purify and cleanse our body and soul.
The work includes marigolds, woven as a garland, evoking traditional South Asian rituals. The garland incorporates native flora, demonstrating diasporic adaptation both as an artistic strategy and a form of survival for migrants and queer communities. The garland is made slowly, with intention and care and incorporates silver anklets gifted to Mandeep by her grandparents. These objects have passed from one generation to another and reference continued migration and displacement in Mandeep’s history, beginning with the Great Partition of 1947, a moment that has deeply impacted Punjabi, Indian, Pakistani, Sikh and Bengali identity today. Handmade prayer ‘mala’ beads are presented in an act of hope and ritual, a meditative practice reconnecting with traditions through art and adornment.
By remembering the names of her ancestors, and laughing when she pronounces them wrong, now speaking Australian-English as a first generation settler, Mandeep relearns her connections to the rivers of Punjab (five waters): Sutlej, Beas, Ravi, Chenab and Jhelum, which have long shaped the identity of that region, while recognising that she now stands on the waterways of Birrarung and Kororoit, which have immense significance to the peoples of this land.
To Forever Ebb and Flow: Queer Time/Migrant Time
Curated by Aziz Sohail, To Forever Ebb and Flow: Queer/Migrant Time is an evolutive exhibition across Monash University's MADA Gallery, and the West Space Window, bringing together international artists and artists in Australia.
The project takes its departure point the distinct propositions of migrant time and queer time, and brings them into conversation.
Reflecting on Ranajit Guha’s meditation on the migrant condition as not just about belonging/disbelonging but also ‘temporal maladjustment’ which occurs due to the rupture of one’s own past (homeland) and present (settler land), this concept is complicated by the concept of queer time. As articulated by Jack Halberstam ‘alternative temporalities’ can be developed outside of logics of ‘paradigmatic markers of life experience namely birth, marriage, reproduction and death.’
How can we then locate queer migrant condition an experience that doubly complicates the notion of time and the affective relations and intimacies that unfold from it. How may we imagine disbelonging and detachment through both these experiences? How do we consider networks and friendship found and fostered, in order to be made possible anew?
British-Somali poet Momtaza Mehri writes, "diaspora is durational loss / we keep moving and moving and moving / we never arrive". This project embodies ebb and flow as two interlinked halves gesturing to circularity, and to conditions of withdrawal, retreat, departure, opacity and gesturing to the past i.e. to ebb and visibility, movement, advancement, arrival and gesturing to the future, or to flow. There is a recognition to move beyond the binaries between the two, understanding that both co-exist simultaneously.
Program
Ebb and Flow: Queer/Migrant Intimacies, Fri 16 Aug, 6 → 8pm
Curator Aziz Sohail in conversation with Thang Do and Mandeep Singh, followed by a reading by Parminder Kaur.
Presented in partnership with un Projects and Monash University.
Mandeep Singh is a South Asian artist living, learning and working on unceded Wurundjeri land. Employing experimental photography and sculpture to explore themes of cultural and personal memory, her practice allows her to relearn her Sikh identity from a diasporic positionality. A major interest for Mandeep is collaboration, letting go of ego and allowing art to be made by multiple hands. This can elevate work and create a space for artists and materials to speak with one another.
Aziz Sohail is a Pakistani-born curator, writer and researcher whose work builds interdisciplinary connections between art, history, archives, literature, theory and biography and supports new cultural and pedagogical infrastructures. Their research and resultant projects honour and recognise the power of queer and feminist collectivity, sociability, joy and wayward encounter. Aziz is completing a PhD in Curatorial Practice at Monash University.
