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.

The Refugee Boat – Some Thoughts on an Alternative History of Transport

10.03.2022

If you go to a transport museum, the likelihood is that you will see ultra-expensive vehicles which were at the cutting edge of technology. These cars, buses, trains and trams would have had all the modern conveniences and would have been fairly safe, even if safety standards in the past were laxer. In terms of production, an entire army of workers would have been involved in the construction, probably an ‘international’ team (by which I mean white Europeans).

The history you would find in such museums would be progressive, a story of increasing rationality, efficiency, cost-effectiveness, capitalism, big business. A story the rich tell themselves to celebrate the world that they have created: the globalised, interlinked world of transport convenience. Where, theoretically, there are no physical barriers to community, commuting, connection.

Standing out in stark contrast to this ‘Whig’ version of history is the humble refugee boat.

The refugee boat is fairly inexpensive. It is the mode of transport of the poor, the desperately oppressed seeking a better life in the only way that they can given their losses in the lottery of life and birth. The refugee boat, while not the worst piece of technology ever invented, is still pretty primitive. The standard image is the unpretentious dinghy, clearly unfit for the purpose of a long journey by the sea in dangerous waters. Travel by sea is itself one of the longest, most inconvenient, inefficient and deadly forms of travel, where you are seemingly at the utmost mercy of nature. There are no modern conveniences. Hardly any water to drink, hardly any room for food. No toilet. There is no safety. There is probably more than a 50:50 chance of death. What about the production? The workers that made these products were probably exploited in sweatshops in economically less dominant countries around the globe.

The history of the refugee boat is the unadulterated, unpolished history of transport in our times. History is not always written by the victors. It is also written by the losers. The refugee boat is the testament to the fact that our modes of travel are not objectively the best. They are merely fit for the types of people and the societies that use them. The transport history in museums is the product of capitalism and the reign of the rich. The transport history of the undocumented migrants is the product of those that power has missed out, those that capitalism has downtrodden.

The unvarnished history of the refugee boat – which the media presents as a horrible throwback to primitive times, a history which is now culminating in government interception of such travellers and their lives being thrown away like trash somewhere else, as someone else’s problem – is the real history of travel beyond propaganda, advertisement, embellishment, cultural narcissism. This is the real story of the world that the ultra-rich have created: a world where you can’t even travel from one country to another to try and better your life. A world in which you are tied to the place you were born and the lack of opportunities there. Why can’t anyone tell this history?