Beyond Measure: Domesticating Distance

In an unexpected response, the RMG’s carpeted floors elicited viewers to engage with Syed’s work by lying directly underneath it, allowing them to become more comfortable with the unsettling subject matter. Additionally, Syed stated in a panel discussion that children are frequently drawn to this piece due to its recognizable shape, demonstrating the dissemination of the drone in popular culture through video games, delivery services and other recreational forms. The simplistic construction and display of Syed’s drones resemble toy models, adding an innocent quality that conveys the modern, desensitized representation of war as a game—as evidenced in the mechanics of controlling unmanned drones, which is parallel to first person-shooter games. In The Flying Rug of Drones, Syed reinstates the drone’s image as a violent weapon, reminding onlookers of the real-world implications that his simulation draws from. Shifting from fantastical Orientalist stories involving flying carpets, and readdressing the drone as a tool for war, Syed’s rugs conjure the dark realities of Islamophobia and extremism in a post-9/11 world.

The process of diasporic communities altering their everyday rituals and codes is a continual search in creating and finding new hybrid cultural forms. Bangladesh-born artist Asma Sultana focuses on the difficult and sometimes traumatic process of assimilation. Located in a corner of the gallery is Sultana’s Wherever The Glimpse of a Free Spirit Exists That Will Be My Home (2015). The installation consists of a white petticoat, blouse and a sheet of fabric long enough for a sari, meticulously embroidered with the artist’s own long, dark stands of hair. As curator Ambereen Siddiqui describes, Sultana utilizes hair as a metaphor for her move from Bangladesh to London to Toronto. The artist describes how her hair thinned as she moved, becoming the physical manifestation of the loss she felt in leaving Dhaka. As a means to archive and mitigate the loss of her hair and home, she began collecting it and creating these autobiographical works. In Wherever The Glimpse of a Free Spirit Exists That Will Be My Home, sewing acts as a method of mediating loss, a process of reflection and a form of personal therapy. Sultana plays an active role as artist, performer and medium as she uses a component of her body as the tools to stitch her work together, the use of a needle acting as a therapeutic form of healing through its ability to unite and bring distinct entities together. In a wonderful transformation and act of repurposing, Sultana converts the hair that she once lost into something new, paying homage to her journey in an effort to regain what has slipped away.

In tackling the subject of migration and displacement, “Beyond Measure” examined the emotional implications of transitional families. Looking at the effects of relocation through a pen-pal process, Surendra Lawoti and Meera Margaret Singh’s Of Light and Longing (2014–15) documents a photographic correspondence between the two artists over the course of a year. The work is displayed through two projected screens meeting at a perpendicular angle. As an image by Lawoti flashes, so does one by Singh. Unique to the other participants of “Beyond Measure,” the two artists focus largely on their loved ones and friends: Lawoti on his wife, who he is waiting to join him in Toronto; and Singh on her child, who she had just given birth to when their correspondence began. Displayed in a style similar to family slideshows, the photographs document the two artists’ feelings of loneliness and longing, as well as their intimate life moments. Of Light and Longing may be the most literal work in terms of portraying domestic space and distance, but also the most ambiguous. The subjects in these images are sporadic and range in location and layout; though, gradually, reoccurring faces can be made out. The work draws audiences in with a hint of personal history, while also distancing viewers with its highly subjective presentation. In this manner, the work allows for audiences to project memories of people from their own lives onto the detached and fictionalized characters on screen. Lawoti and Singh’s correspondence unites their individual experiences of living in a diaspora as a non-linear process with moments of stillness and unexpectedness.

Eschewing conventional strategies of portraying diversity by focusing on specific ethnic enclaves, “Beyond Measure” generated a more complex dialogue on what constitutes Canadian art, by focusing on how the exhibited artists negotiate their identities. The city of Oshawa provided an appropriate platform for the exhibition, which as Siddiqui states, challenge[d] ideas of locating oneself within displacement, the nuances of in-between spaces, and the search for the familiar." In defining the diaspora, “Beyond Measure” reached past definitions of identity politics in terms of people coming from a common ancestry, and instead focused on the future that they wish to build for themselves.

“Beyond Measure: Domesticating Distance” was on view at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Ontario, until January 3, 2016.