MAMA RAJ
An Anglo-Indian Family History
ADRIAN SHAW
Wednesday 7 - Friday 30 December 2011
Launch Event: Saturday 10 December, 3pm - 5pm
ARTIST STATEMENT: ADRIAN SHAW, Nov-Dec (2011)
My work here explores my diasporic, Anglo-Indian family history which is typical of this group from Raj to post-Indian independence. I have based my research on family trees, old photographs as archival material, and interviews with the senior surviving member of my family, my mother. I have re-photographed this material digitally, and used video-film, printing, assemblage, montage , collage and text (based on previous published and unpublished poems and stories) to produce work which ranges from 2-dimensional to time-based (4-D). I employ ‘layering’, reversal and distortion of images (re.‘Memory’).
Although the work may be perceived as ‘autobiographical’, it is also political in terms of the search for Identity and Memory, which is questioned and critiqued in post-colonialist terms. For the historically-based ‘Anglo-Indian’ (A-I) represents a challenge - and future hope - in this post 9/11, 7/7, still racist world. Memory always presents a challenge, linked as it is to Identity, especially in a group which continually, and continuously asks itself ‘who are/am we/I?’, and which often sets up myths about itself. For historically, within the history of the Sub-Continent, Anglo-Indians have represented a ‘middle’, ‘Subaltern’ (Spivak, Biswas, et al) group. Similar groups, in other racial and other contexts have been similarly intra- and inter- critiqued (Bisexuals, The Pied-Noir in French Saharan Africa, East Indians in the Caribbean, etc) by writers such as E. Said, F. Fanon, and V.S. Naipaul. There is also an element of self- and extra- racism and hatred.
My mother, for example, would ‘white’ me up with face-powder / make-up as a child in order that I ‘passed’ within the hegemonic (white European) group with which we ‘mixed’ people sought to identify ourselves. We served as soldiers, teachers, police, on railways, shoring-up Empire…
The work on show (some, ‘in process’), will link montaged, mixed-media, metallic and plain white-painted MDF boards, small photo-transferred and other paintings on canvas, photographs and prints, to videos. I used metallic paints(gold, silver, bronze, copper, pewter) representing ‘valued’, elements and metals - themselves mined, worked, coined in the British (and other) Empires, which enabled the ruling hegemony to exercise control - along with jewels, cloth, spices, foodstuffs, etc., which I have included in the montages. I also have written my identity-memory poems in a ‘black book’ using gold and silver inks (‘Silver Threads Among the Gold’). I am exploring ‘light-generating’ methods.
The work (based on my previous researches: (‘BlackBox’,‘Pigeonhole’,‘Bloodbrothers’, etc., and writing) is arranged in several adjacent spaces/sections:
1st: INTRODUCTORY: 2D Texts, Definitions, images of celebrated Anglo-Indians, other images, books, photographs, collages/montages (some metallic spray-painted Gold / Silver / Copper-Bronze), prints and family trees, In display-boxes: my father’s Service Medals / part of his uniform, & Hockey stick; a T-shirt bearing a metallic spray-painted battiked image and prints of my maternal great-grandmother; family photographs & reproductions. an Installation of plates, (these pieces also metallic, spray-painted metaphors for Empire and Hybridity) on a table, with images of Union and Indian flags and my family.
2nd: VIDEO I: On a larger screen, is ‘Mama Raj’, an (‘in process’) film of my relationship and conversations with my mother concerning our (typical) ‘Anglo-Indian’ family history, concentrating on Raj and Post-Raj times.
Nearby are digital versions of old photos of my family, showing the path to our hybrid identity.
3rd: Two VIDEOS pieces, projected on monitors:
II. ‘Elements3’: an evocative short piece, utilising movement in the three biospheres (Air/Land/Water) as metaphors for ‘diaspora’/ mobile ‘Identity’.
III. ‘Bloodbrothers’: a video of a short tape-slide presentation exploring the relationship between my deceased Father and myself, incorporating a poem and semi-abstract images using natural substances – blood/food/dyes -, in a spectrum.
4th. INSTALLATIONS & PAINTINGS: Exploring issues of ‘Identity’, Memory & Diaspora: ‘Pigeonhole’, ‘Black-Box’, etc.
5th. A Poetry / Performance Space/Workshop area - ‘Home’: with a couch, Indian elephant coffee tables, cloths, brasses, texts and other materials, & mirror with text (in lipstick).
I hope this exhibition will go a long way to remind people in Britain that there was an Empire once, which was the home of a people which was rejected, and betrayed when India went ‘independent’ - some of whom remained in that great Country as loyal, useful citizens, and others who came out to the ‘Mother Country’ and elsewhere in the Commonwealth, and who still remain largely unrecognised, although with many surprisingly famous members (some who still, sadly, reject their mixed-identity), such as Cliff Richard, Englebert Humperdinck, Merle Oberon, Ava Gardner, Colin Cowdrey, Joanna Lumley, Ben Kingsley, Freddie Mercury, Anna Lenowens, et al, who either racially, or culturally belong to the group ‘Anglo-Indian’.
And, of course, today, there are groups facing the same problems in our ‘multi-cultural’ Western societies, (young British Asians, etc.), who are undergoing their own struggles for identity and acceptance in the melange, in order to be accepted as ‘Citizens…’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: my Parents & Family, The Management & Staff of the New Art Exchange Nottingham, and other supportive friends, colleagues and individuals.
c. AS. Dec. 2011, Nottingham