Interview
A journey to the roots
Allan deSouza's parents were Indian who migrated to Kenya, and lthen to London. and later settles in New York. Allan is having his first solo show ever in India at the Talwar Art Gallery. Akansha Rastogi had a quality conversation before the opening of the show. This is a brief of the conversation.
Akansha Rastogi: My first question is about your geographical location – Born to Indian parents, who settled in Kenya and then migrated to London, then further to Los Angeles and New York. Having lived in a multicultural environment, free from the sense of belonging to a particular place/ locale, you speak from the position of an ‘urban nomad’ – who in the process, I would call it generational (from generation to generation) process has lost his point of origin. And this existential angst having become normative eases global movements, and also gives you dual powers – of being an insider and outsider. How do you respond to this fluidity? In this regard, how do you see exhibiting your works for the first time in a solo show in India, a country of your parent’s origin?
Allan deSouza: I just came back from Goa where we’ve a family house. Met artists there, had a dialogue with them, got involved with the space. Non-belongingness! I don’t take it as angst. It’s more like belonging to many places, and I feel at ease with it. My wife Yong Soon Min is Korean American. So, I’ve connections in Korea too. What interests me is how one links these places together rather than viewing it as a ‘Loss’.
I’m also aware of my position as an outsider that gives me a different vantage at times. For example, my works on America is about America as a Nation. Because of my position, I can critique it. I’m using the question of location productively in my work.
About this exhibition in India, as you enter the gallery the first picture one encounters is that of my mother, part of ‘The Lost Picture’ series which I did after my mother’s death in 2003. It’s of personal significance to me, bringing her back here. I’m not sure how audience will receive this exhibition. Archetype photography is documentative or serves as visual evidence. My pictures are different kinds of documents. These could be treated as photographs, or even as drawings or paintings because of the surface. I enjoy this boundary of photographs slipping into being something else. I want the viewer to question what they are looking at. My photographs work more like memory– not totally reliable, reconstructions, images change, as if something is withheld within the picture, hazy the way our memories are. I’m also interested in the layers of present that intervene with the images of the past, particularly in the ‘The Lost Picture’ series.
Again, about belonging we are sometimes intruders or tourists in our own cities. I’m interested in how we encounter and perhaps cross divides. These can be about territory or about social relations, for example class.
AR: Now, the consciousness of belonging to a certain race, and not belonging to a location – how these two pulls govern your artistic practice, as these contradictions also put you or in that sense the entire Diaspora in vulnerable position as one often encounters ethnic stereotypes. Race vis-à-vis your work – you’ve participated in many important representative exhibitions of contemporary African Art such as ‘The Essential Black Art’ in 1988, to the traveling show ‘Africa Remix’ in 2004. Can you elaborate on your involvement with Black Art Movement in the 1980s?
ADS: The Black Arts Movement was an alliance between African Caribbeans and South Asians, based on a shared history of colonialism. With Africa Remix, it’s important to think of Africa as multi-ethnic, there are many Indians living there who can claim Africa as their own. Those exhibitions were about expanding the boundary of what Africa can be.
My reasons are different than just about race. Yes! One is constantly dealing with issues of race and all that – I do try to deal with these questions in my work through contaminating ideas of nationalism, territory. For example, in ‘Threshold’ series, I try to explore the ways in which Race marks territories. I also insert bodily elements to question ownership of territory (such as in ‘Terrain’ series). There are instances such as my encounter with a fellow passenger who tried to stop me from clicking pictures as he took it as a deed of terrorism because of my brown body. I want to deal with Race in more complex ways. In England, Black Art Movement peaked at the end of the 1980s. In the 1980s, I was involved in organizing events, getting attention to African and Asian artists. At that time we had to do everything ourselves, curating and writing about shows, educating audiences. Also, as an artist, one doesn’t have to bear the burden of talking only about race, as though that is the only thing that distinguishes you. Why not ask a European artist about race, since it is a question for everyone?
AR: Black Arts Movement was primarily a literary movement in African-American Literature that grew in 1960s with many Africans opening their own publishing houses, and taking the onus of writing their own histories. I’m wondering how it was in England at that time…
ADS: I was influenced by the Civil Rights Movement in America. The idea of a colonized group living in the colonizing country. It was a crucial moment as we were the first generation to grow up in England, and going to college. We didn’t have that sense of ‘home’ being elsewhere, but were very grounded in British life and politics….The 1970s and 80s in England were extremely polarized racially. There were lot of political movements about race, immigration. So the works done during that time were politicized in relation to that. We were the generation with shared historical legacy, and had to grapple with it. For example, at the art school I never had a teacher of African or Asian origin. So no model for me as a young artist. But artists like Bhupen Khakhar, G. M. Sheikh, Geeta Kapur and Vivan Sundaram visited my art school, and I had already visited India and met a number of artists so I did have a sense of Indian contemporary art.
AR: Talking in terms of post-colonial discourses, your work like ‘The Return of the Hunted’ (2005) is a subversion of a colonial allegory of the Hunter and the Hunted; wherein the colonized arrives for cleaning with brooms rather than hunting with spears in snowy, virgin white grounds of the colonizer. It becomes more problematic by putting your self-image as the colonized, as it narrates the century long story of imperialism, of displacement of natives, of slave trade, and of forced migration. Your exhibition such as ‘AlterNatives’ (1997) in collaboration with your wife Yong Soon Min explore in greater detail these issues of race. Can you elaborate on your strategies of resistance as an artist, and developing counter-discourses?
ADS: The colonized were no longer outside the boundary, but within the colonizing country. The fact is colonizer never imagined that the colonized will be inside their own geographical boundary. Look at it now! England is multiethnic. I did this work ‘The Return of the Hunted’ during a residency in Maine, USA. It was snowy, and people often had conversations about snow – about it’s beauty and purity. I thought it could also be a conversation about race. The Hunters are carrying brooms. It takes someone’s labour to keep it clean, to purify it. And mostly, it’s the African and Asians who do the menial jobs of cleaning. In the ‘Threshold’ series (1996-98) as well I make the same connection to labour. There are elements such as a bucket and other cleaners’ tools.
If one is in pristine environment, a body becomes contamination of that space. Brown body as the source of contamination. I allow contamination, such as in ‘The Lost Picture’ series (2004) wherein I deliberately…I want to critique the belief that there can be purity. I resist the idea of historical purity – racial purity or class purity - in my works. It’s like a balancing act. Though I’ve these concerns, and I embed them in my works but I don’t want viewer to directly come to these. I want them to ask questions and arrive at their own answers.
AR: I’m reminded of your three day Bed-In performance – ‘Will **** for Peace’ (2003-04).
ADS: That’s also a play with Race, that I could be John Lennon. Asking audience to fill the commitment bubble, and do the activity they commit to inside the gallery. Whenever we’ve (me and Yong Soon Min) done this performance, people engage, talk and stay in the gallery for hours. They converse with me as I was really John Lenon, and Yong was Yoko Ono. In the forthcoming 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, we will be performing a version of Bed-In.
AR: Coming to the specifics of your work in the current exhibition ‘A Decade of Photoworks 1998-2008’ at Talwar Art Gallery, Delhi - Your use of the device of putting an image and its mirror-image together to make one complete picture such as in ‘Divines series (2007-8) and the ‘UFO’ series (2007) can be read as putting together of polarities on one single sheet. The result on one hand opens possibilities of alternative viewing, and makes the final image more mysterious and overpowering as in the ‘Divines’ series; and on the other hand it incisively critiques the colonial discourse that propagated the representation of the native as binary opposite of the Europe/ the mother country.
ADS: Interesting take! When you are looking at a landscape, and doubling it – the view changes. It becomes a territory haunted by a body that creates anxiety – something divine or demonic. Shrines are a way of reaching to the divine. These shrines are created out of the ground, something so specific.
AR: In ‘UFO’ series you indulge in construction of unidentified flying objects – vehicles that transport aliens or ‘the other’ into Definite Identifiable Euro-centric/ western zones. The nature and existence of ‘the other’ remains obscure, who perhaps was once the colonized native, but now part of the Diaspora hung in a foreign land. The ‘Threshold’ series (1996-98) clearly maps these geographical displacements as it captures the spaces where this migratory phenomenon is acted out. Empty of human presence except the photographic eye, these spaces narrate those moments of wait before the exodus, the odyssey, moments in-transit. As the protagonist of these performative journeys/ travels, how do you see your role as Native, representative of the collective?
ADS: I don’t have a US passport, so my designation is that of an Alien. If you are a green card holder that shows your class. And yes, aliens arrive by planes. In the ‘UFO’ series its like as if you are looking at something ordinary – a missile or shadow of a plane – play on something unidentifiable.
I do think of the photographs in ‘Threshold’ as an act of restaging. I wanted to make them more interactive, and beautiful. These pictures are as much about the desire. The Desire to go to England. The repetition of emptiness becomes sinister. Behind the attraction is the oppressive silence. One can’t experience that first encounter again, one can only restage it.
AR: If I juxtapose your architectural collages of landscapes, cityscapes, skylines to construct huge panorama that often make a satiric comment for instance, ‘Everything West of Here is Indian Country’ (2003), ‘All for Freedom…’ (2006) with the personal photographs of ‘The Lost Pictures’ series (2004) that are studies in genealogy, time, and personal spaces – intentionally abstracted because of the consciousness of the autobiographical. I want to enquire about your indulgence in Histories – History of Nations, Cities, Territories and personal History.
ADS: The cityscapes are about the US – America’s sense of itself as a nation and its foreign policies. They are a critique of U.S. nationalism. The work ‘All for Freedom…’ (????) is a picture of a white city. In 1893 Columbian Exposition at Chicago, a white city was built which took on from Roman and Greek Architecture, and propagated the idea of the USA as an Empire. My white city is build of trash. This work was put on a billboard, and as you drive past – the text written in the background ‘Take Cover’ often reads as ‘Take Over’. U.S. Army prepares against terrorism by taking over.
‘The Lost Picture’ series is linked to the Kenyan History as well. All photographs were taken during 1963-65. And, 1963 is the Kenyan Independence year. There’s a sense of optimism of a new country. Plus, these pictures were in the process of getting lost. And reworking on these images is an act of recovery. My mother was blind when she died. I’m also exploring in this series the relationship between memory and sight. The idea is an attempt to get them back into vision. Get memory back into vision. In the work ‘Bike’ there are few children playing in the street. These are African & Indian kids – a mixed neighbourhood.
AR: How do you link a decade of your works exhibited in this show.
ADS: It is linked more through my travels, the sites of travel and the idea of transition; what happens to the migrant in that transition. Places that are left behind, an accumulation of what has happened in the processes. The idea of past & present moving together – what happens when you are actually in transition. This passage is also the place of imagination. Pictures like ‘Divines’ & ‘UFO’ become manifestations of our cultural anxieties. The things that we fear – the aliens and the demonic. And also the place of desire, of shrines and gods. It’s through such encounters with anxiety and desire that we construct our collective and individual selves. |
