Beyond Frontiers – Contemporary British Art by Artists of South Asian Descent

The Autobahn (extract)
Sutapa Biswas

Born in 1965 of Indian parentage, Permindar Kaur undertook her training as an artist at Sheffield City Polytechnic where she studied for a Bachelor’s degree in fine art between 1986 and 1989; she then undertook her Master’s degree at Glasgow School of Art between 1990 and 1992.

In 1992, I visited the New Contemporaries exhibition at the ICA, London. Just behind a wall positioned approximately central to the lower exhibition gallery, I walked into a space containing what seemed to me to be a forest of floating dreams. There was a series of ten tall, steel, double-headed arrows, each balanced on the floor at one end. With one exception, balanced on the opposite ends of the arrows were small and beautiful objects made of glass, varying in size and form. (Some of the objects were more abstracted than others -a dress, some steps, what seemed to be a windmill or fan, a seat, drums, an Indian kitchen tool/knife, a pair of trousers). There was a stillness about them that was both strange and disturbing. The piece as a whole relied on a delicate system of weight distribution and balance between the floor surface, the steel arrows and the glass objects. Glass against steel, its raw materials, rendered the mechanics of the work clearly visible, both accentuating its fragility and emphasising the apparent contradiction between gravity and surface. Such evident fragility made it difficult for the viewer not to feel that the slightest excess of movement or sudden disturbance would send this beautiful constellation crashing to the floor. Suspended between a desire to walk through its landscape and a fear of creating too much floor movement, the viewer was caught in a moment of unease.

Permindar Kaur’s Arrival, made in 1991, is an evocative work which invites the viewer to become a voyeur in a fractured landscape or private territory. As the title clearly suggests, it explores themes of culture and migration. To an extent, there is an inherent ambiguity which is not specific to matters of either race or gender, since most of us, regardless of our race and gender, have at some point in our lives experienced the trauma of moving home. The miniature scale of the glass objects reminds us of a child’s toys. Perhaps it is through the childlike quality of the piece that the viewer is allowed to bring to the work his/her own desires and sense of the past.

Arrival seems absorbed in the psychology of transition and dislocation, the complexity of which is focused through a system of clues. The double­ headed arrows seem to signify both a point of departure and arrival. Simultaneously, they can be read as weapons and markers of territory. Locked in binary oppositions, Kaur’s work centres both on a desire to announce presence and on the fear of doing so. The glass objects balanced on top of the steel arrows seem to suggest those functional objects we might take with us when uprooting to a new place. They are also like fragments of a dream pregnant with expectation: the spokes of what appears to be a small windmill or fan, frozen in motion, become reminders of climatic changes; a small shape resembling a child’s dress signifies both innocence and vulnerability; a satellite dish prompts us to think about messages carried through the air across huge distances. (In conversation, Kaur remarks that the work was built during the period of the Gulf War and it also reminds her of her aunt and uncle first moving to Glasgow.) From afar, their translucence allows these objects to interact with each other, causing them to disappear from strange perspectives and throwing the viewer’s perception of their exact dimensions. It is perhaps upon this spatial transience that the strength of Kaur’s work hinges. By using a material through which the viewer can see, the objects can be read as an echo of the vulnerability of human life.

Kaur’s choice of materials – glass, metal, copper, terracotta -and the incorporation of found objects which function as unspecified symbols, are clearly paramount to the language and private symbolism she constructs within her work.

Glasshouses, made in October 1991, was conceived and constructed soon after Arrivals and can perhaps be considered as a more ambitious project. The work comprises six, large-scale houses each measuring 170cm x 200cm x 150cm. Although the dimensions of the houses are fairly consistent, their architecture and internal configuration varies. They are made from large sheets of glass held together by silicone and, in part, by a steel framework. Their architecture resembles that commonly found in India (and in hot European climates). Each has a staircase on the exterior built entirely of glass and, on top, is the shell of a roof garden. The interior floor is made from glass and each has an entrance way through which viewers are able to enter, if they dare. An assortment of terracotta-like objects is arranged randomly either inside, perhaps on a glass shelf or, otherwise, placed in clusters outside. Some of the objects seem more abstract while others resemble those that might be found in an Indian home: texts representing a guru’s four or five houses; a clay prayer book stand; a small object resembling the female uterus, which is a candle wick holder; a clay sword (symbolic to the Sikh religion) gently bent as if it has melted onto the surface of the shelf which carries it; numerous pots; a pan for unleavened bread; other kitchen utensils and a flag.

As with Arrivals, in looking at Glasshouses the viewer is confronted with disappearing perspectives and interlocking structures. The whole is reminiscent of a museum where objects are placed inside ‘cabinets,’ contained and as if frozen in time. Here, however, the cabinets are substituted by small, fragile, glass houses. The impact of light against the glass creates a myriad of reflections, including the viewer’s own, thus curiously bringing the whole to life. Whereas, in most anthropological museums ¹⁰ distance between the viewer and the ethnographic collections is discreetly, if not deliberately preserved, Kaur’s work skillfully plays upon the divide by inviting the viewer physically to enter the space of the houses themselves. The effect is to remind us of the vulnerability of home (wherever its location) and of human life. Through the clever play of reflections, the illusion of a mini urban setting is evoked. In walking through the work, we are not only voyeurs of a strange place but are also reminded by the presence of our own reflections that we, too, may be the object of another’s gaze.

In speaking with Kaur, she talked of the influence upon her work of Nan Goldin’s photographs, particularly the way in which they intrude on other’s lives. As in Goldin’s work, Glasshouses move between the personal, interior space, or private world, and the metropolis or the public world. Like Goldin, Kaur is a flaneuse.¹¹ The difference, however, seems to be that Kaur’s work, by cleverly orchestrating the viewer into a position of being both voyeur and participant, circumvents what, for me, are some of the more problematic, intrusive aspects of Goldin’s photographs. Kaur’s ability to make the viewer engage with an urban experience in all its forms renders her work compelling. This is partly achieved by her ability to incorporate signs and symbols from the city environment which seem, on the one hand, to be part of an archive of images with which one is familiar and, on the other, to be completely alien. Through this device of drawing on the familiar and the unfamiliar, the viewer is instilled both with a sense of fear or danger and beauty. It is interesting that, in speaking with Kaur, she cited Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness ¹² as a favourite book. Perhaps it can be argued that the sense of trepidation she is able to articulate through her work is precisely an aspect of human nature that we manifest when encountering something new for the first time, be it a new city, a pub in Dagenham or Devon, or an ethnographic display in a museum. Through her playfulness, Kaur brings into consciousness or focus one’s sense of the fear of ‘difference,’ whilst at the same time evoking a sense of the familiar, thereby questioning notions of difference.

⁽¹⁰⁾For an interesting discussion on the ideology of the museum, see Douglas Crimp, ‘On the Museum’s Ruins’ in Post-Modern Culture, edited and introduced by Hal Foster; Pluto Press, 1985.

⁽¹¹⁾The term, flâneuse is borrowed from Janet Wolff’s reference in her essay, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity; in Feminine Sentences, Essays on Women and Culture; Polity Press, 1990. ‘Flâneuse’ is the feminine form of the masculine ‘flaneur.’ The term ‘flaneur’ was originally coined by the critic and poet, Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) to describe a mail dandy who is in his element in the crowd – at the centre of the world and at the same time hidden from the world. See C Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ in The Painter of Modern life and Other Essays, 1863. Trans and ed Jonathan Mayne; Phaidon Press, Oxford, 1964.

⁽¹²⁾Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Penguin Books, 1980

Sutapa Biswas, the autobahn (extract), pg 202 – 206

From Beyond Frontiers – Contemporary British Art by Artists of South Asian Descent. Edited by Aml Ghosh and Juginder Lamba

Published in 2001 by Saffron Books

ISBN: 1 872843 21