The Turner Prize 2024 – ‘Punjabi’ Art is Shortlisted

24.04.2024

What’s on the Turner Prize shortlist this year in terms of ‘Punjabi’ art? Covered with a giant white doily, a red Ford Escort vehicle is presented to us. The ‘art’ is in front of a photograph of a family with the car.

Rosie Cooper, director of Wysing Arts Centre, who sits on the judging panel, said Kaur sees the vehicle as a “representation of her dad’s first car and his migrant desires” and it “blasted snippets of uplifting pop songs referencing freedom and liberation throughout the space”.

https://news.sky.com/story/artist-who-covered-sports-car-with-giant-doily-nominated-for-turner-prize-13122021

Suneel’s Comment

Obviously the artist shortlisted in this country – when they are Indian – would necessarily be female. This is what ‘diversity’ means to white people when it comes to the Subcontinent – the women. Their books, their art, their cinema. It is all celebrated. Because they are heroic ‘victims’ of Indian culture to the West. Us men are to be ignored and marginalised. Because we are the ‘oppressors’ of women in this culture.

And what about this piece which white taste has valued? The big white doily is the key. It covers over the car. The migrant desire – according to the rules of white society – is to be covered over in whiteness. The white doily – the whiteness – is self-consciously patterned and artistic – it is the touch of art in the piece. Otherwise, there would just be a car and a family snapshot. The white doily – the whiteness – is what creates this exhibition as a piece of art work. It is what demonstrates ‘taste’, ‘selection’, artistic ‘discrimination’ (the pun is intended).

And what about this ‘migrant desire’ which – despite the capture of the car in the whiteness that is like a constraining net – blasts songs of freedom and liberation (laughable)? It is ideology at work. The veil of ideology covering over the vision of the car, the white veil over things for the migrant experience. Blinding the eyes and vision. Interfering. Coming between self and object, mind and reality. Art is the white veil itself. What else is? They sing of freedom. When they are the exploited. They sing of liberty. When they are constrained and bound by the white net.

The car. The phallic symbol. Red to signify status and dominance. Gross materialism. Migrant desire is couched as greed. Desire for masculinity in this patriarchal white supremacist society. Desire for control – one drives a car.

Desire for freedom – the car represents freedom. A cliched symbol of freedom the car. But this one is caught up in the net. Even the music – they blast snippets of songs about freedom. Even musically, the freedom is partial, disrupted, interrupted, punctured by purposely oppressive silence.

Do you know what the net signifies in India? The net of maya – illusion. Gross materialism. Trickery. What comes between us and the understanding of reality. The doily is perhaps maya. This white culture and its control, its limitation of freedom for the migrant. The doily becomes kitcsch art – described by several art historians as the artwork of a capitalistic, unthinking and unfeeling, philistine and totalitarian society.

Yet, there is a paradox. If I remember correctly from the Metro newspaper article that I read today about the art piece, the doily also represents the Sikh and Indian workers that worked in textiles factories in huge numbers when they first migrated here to the United Kingdom (Metro 24.04.2024). So this net of whiteness is being created by the migrants themselves. Their deference. Their blind adulation. Their willingness to be exploited. Their inability to revolt against the systems of power.

So what are the migrant desires of the Father in this image? As seen through the eyes of a Punjabi woman? Desire to criticise the wants of the Father? Or an attempt to be sympathetic to his wants?

The artist writes:

‘In this show I am having a conversation with personal histories,’ explains Kaur, ‘exploring improvisation and political mysticism as tools to reimagine tradition and inherited myths.’

https://list.co.uk/news/43283/jasleen-kaur-alter-altar

But is this a re-imagination? Look at the piece again. It tries to base itself against reality as ideology – against the photograph, the representation of reality. The photograph has the Indian family in it. The base unit of Punjabi and Indian culture. The finished art exhibit has no family in it. It has a relationship merely to the Father in a patriarchal system of culture. A Father that wants to be covered in whiteness. Is this what is valued in this culture? Probably. The probability is on the side that adulates whiteness and patriarchy. The family is forgotten in favour of the Master. In favour of isolation and individualism. In favour of the desire for mastery and control and power.

Review of Tsunagu/Connect: Uncovering the Lives of Japanese Women in the UK. (Barbican Centre)

18.02.2024

My mother is a migrant from India. Many of my relatives and friends are migrant women. I volunteered for years teaching migrant and refugee women English. Although I have heard my mother talk about why she came to the UK, I haven’t heard in much detail about what these women think of their arrival here, their journey in becoming British – even when I have asked them about it. You get snips and pieces: women that feel the hostility of this environment and the judgement of the people here over them. You get a sense of the insecurity and loneliness, the lack of belonging, when you watch them orchestrate their lives around phone calls and video calls back home, when you see that their closest friends are other migrant women from their home country. You sense their confusion about life here in London and the people here from the comments that they make. Tsunagu/Connect was a chance to hear what they wanted to be heard said about all of these topics.

Addressing the neglect of the topic, this exhibition is about the personal experiences and memories of migrant Japanese women that have come to the UK since the end of the Second World War. Over 30 Japanese women were interviewed to provide the oral histories for the exhibition on a one to one basis.

One of the stated aims of the exhibition is to overturn the ‘myths about Japanese women as passive and obedient housewives and provide an insight into the complexity, diversity, and agency of Japanese women in the UK’.

I picked out a few of the exhibits that caught my interest. I didn’t have time to listen to the audio descriptions. Masayo Aizawa chose to talk about her father through a strange object which she remembered him through, a calculator. She spoke about his harshness and the fact that he was traditional, that she could never express her gratitude to her father and that she only understood him late in life. This exhibit was interesting to me because it is often arbitrary objects that we associate with people. Because this was an example of a migrant woman reflecting on the people that she left behind, that she couldn’t get to know as well as she wanted to, that she had to separate herself from. And at the end of the exhibit, she says that she is like her father – it is just the illusion of separation. Perhaps this is what these migrant women feel – that their connection with the people around them in their countries of birth is unbreakable, one of the greatest influences on their lives. Perhaps this is what gives them stability and belonging, their identities.

Elizabeth Fusae Thurley spoke about what has been the astounding fact that I have witnessed throughout my life – that someone can come into a new country without knowing anything about it and at the greatest risk of precarity. Sometimes, they don’t even know the language. Elizabeth had come with a man with no job, no house and whose parents were against the marriage. She astonished herself with her bravery. You have to have courage to leave everything behind for a hope. She reminded me of my grandfather who came to this country from India and left everything behind him for the hope – the future for the children. Elizabeth came here in the hope of love: she got it.

Atsuko kamura spoke about how strange the people seemed here when she came: ‘The people sitting on the tube looked like as soon as they got off the train they would go and kill themselves’. That quote conveys the radical sense of defamiliarisation that these women experienced when they came to this country. But it carries a sadder tone for me – she came here for her happiness. But what she found when she first came here was sadness. What you think will make you happy in life often makes you sad. It is the way of the world.

This is conveyed most vividly in the story of Haruka Kuroda: ‘soon after I arrived in the UK, I was extremely homesick. I didn’t speak a word of English and for about 3 months, I called home every day using collect calls – remember those?! – costing my parents over £1000 on the phone bill each month!’

The dual kinship of the women here to their home countries and to the UK was apparent in the desire of Miyuki Tanaka to have her ashes floating in the air around Japan and the UK. After all, when they are here, the UK becomes their home. But it doesn’t always supersede their original home for all these women. Home is home is home. You can have more than one home – and what could be better than to have many places to call a home?

I reflected on the exhibition for a good while. Was it a success? Was it a failure? Some of the stories were about the bravery of these women, their pioneering entry into art school. Some of them were about their bravery in love, like I have mentioned above. Some of them were about the sadness, the struggle. The narrative of the exhibition is to present these women as heroes in the traditional mould – someone brave that faces adversity, that overcomes, that achieves, that finds a place in the world. The exhibition wants us to think of these women as strong. As strength. But I have a question. When the whole world is dominated by the West, when this country has a superiority complex, when the whole world is being Westernised, when people in this country think that every other country is misogynistic and a restriction on women’s freedom, how innocent is this narrative? Isn’t it just part of the problem? Is the only way a woman can be seen as a hero is to embrace the West? The Indian watches. The Indian judges. The Indian finds the exhibition wanting. What strikes the Indian is the sadness of coming to this land. To endure here. The disappointment. The defeat of the dream. That is what I found in this exhibition.

Being Forced to Pay Extortion for Love: An Analysis of the Threshold Raise to £38,700 to bring a foreign family partner to the UK

Dr. Suneel Mehmi – LLB Honours in Laws, LLM in Law and Society, PhD in the Law and English Literature

JAI MAA KAALI!

13.01.2023

The Legal Change (FACTS)

From April 2024, the minimum salary requirement for people who want to bring a foreign family member or partner to the UK will rise to £38,700. This is a jump from the current threshold of £18,600.

Comparative Law (FACTS)

Where countries do express the requirement as a minimum income, such as in Belgium or Norway, Library research has so far not found any examples of the threshold being set above or close to £38,700 (the level the UK Government ultimately intends to reach).

Changes to legal migration rules for family and work visas in 2024

SUNEEL’S ANALYSIS: Comparative law shows that this government has to be seen as extorting a price on love compared to every other supposedly civilised Western country in the world. They have deliberately set an unrealistic threshold to counter what they see as the threat of immigration. So, the UK is a pioneer in racism and paranoia over immigration compared to every other country.

The Rationale (SUNEEL’S ANALYSIS)

Obviously, the aim is to cut immigration. However, the unspoken secondary rationale is to construct immigrants as ‘burdens’ on the system who might claim benefits from British people by emphasising that families have to support themselves without any help from the government:

‘Ministers hope the move will cut immigration levels, which have reached record highs in recent years, and ensure families can support themselves’.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-67637504

The ministers are constructing immigration as illegal, attaching the label of illegal to the immigrants that have come into the country, as though this is a violation of fairness, ‘the rules’, the law and order. Again, there is the perception that the immigrants are taking over the country, that their entry is ‘unsustainable’, as though this country with all its wealth and resources couldn’t accommodate them:

In a statement to MPs, the home secretary said migration to the UK “needs to come down” and there had been “abuse” of health and care visas for years.

“Enough is enough,” Mr Cleverly said. “Immigration policy must be fair, legal, and sustainable.”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67612106

The government is using its own failure in providing infrastructure and services to the communities to justify the action it is taking, pitting us against them to cover up its own failure of duty:

‘People are understandably worried about housing, GP appointments, school places and access to other public services when they can see their communities growing quickly in numbers.’

https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2023-12-04/debates/921A08A2-F615-48F2-8C56-423A29556F9F/LegalMigration

Conclusion and Suneel’s Personal Comment

While seeming to apply to everyone in a false pretension of ‘universality’, the policy is deliberately targeted at ethnic minority men who are the most likely to marry abroad and to bring a partner from abroad. As such, this legislation has to be seen as an attack on the ethnic minority men and their ability to marry and to reproduce in this country. This is a deliberately racist and sexist policy.

Yes, white British men and white British women can meet people from abroad or that are not UK citizens and marry them. No one is saying that is not the case. However, what is the bigger likelihood about who this will happen to – someone who has deep connections with the people of another country, or people that most likely don’t?

The policy asks the ethnic minority man to become wealthier than the average worker. What is the average wage in this country? The threshold is above it –

According to the ONS, the average salary in the UK in 2023 for all employees was £29,669, a 6.8% increase from 2022. For full-time workers, the average UK salary in 2023 was £34,963, a 5.8% increase YoY. https://standout-cv.com/pages/average-uk-salary

Why should ethnic minority men (or men that want to marry someone from abroad) have to be wealthier than all of the other men in this country to bring someone over? Why do they have to work harder than everyone else? There is no reason for it, except to discourage people from marrying someone from abroad. And to make anyone that can’t earn enough feel like a man that cannot even provide for his family and afford to love someone from a community in a different country, to render them financially powerless and devalue them and their ties and roots.

The ethics of the legislation are horrible. How disgusting is it to put a price on love? How disgusting is it to put up walls around love so that people cannot move within the channels of love? Are other people from other countries – who haven’t been brought up in the privilege and wealth that we have – whose financial problems have probably been caused by us in this country and the Western world – aren’t they loveable? Can they not be the wives and mothers, or husbands and fathers in this country?

The government’s financial control of the family unit – the original economy – is unethical, unfair, unjust and, I would argue, illegal. They are acting ultra vires – everyone has the right to a family irrespective of money. Someone here can marry someone and then claim benefits because they have married a UK citizen. Someone from here can have kids if they can’t afford them and then rely on the government for help. And they do. This ‘problem’ that legislates love is a false problem because the government only sees immigrants as a burden on the system out of racism.

Can I ask you, do you have to buy the right to be a citizen in a country, or to become a wife, husband, father or mother? Do you have to buy these things? Since when? Why do you have to be a wallet to love someone? Is money everything in this world, the only condition for love and the family? How disgusting do you have to be to think this? Isn’t the government supposed to support love and the family? Why is nobody challenging these laws? This law is the mark of a government that only cares about money and keeping its money to itself, that literally sees citizenship and love as expenditure that is not worth having – unless you keep to your own in this country. Endogamy is the practice of only marrying within your own community, clan or tribe. This is the legislation of endogamy which bears striking similarity to those people that make their children marry their cousins so that they can keep the money in the family – a practice only concerned with resources, ownership and a financial distrust of any outsider who will come in and take a portion of the share for themselves.