A Multimedia installation collaboration between Tiffany Singh and Mandrika Rupa. The work is directly informed by their backgrounds in cultural and community-based work. The collaboration aims to illuminate alternative histories, recontextualising national identities, especially those immigrants of Indian descent, in new lands. Both artists consider their cultural artistic practice to be their own subjective truth to further the narrative around migration. Resulting in a new work titled Remnant, an installation developed out of both artists' personal need to explore the social implications of immigrant communities and the effects ethnicity has on this process. The fibre art commission supports the Siddhi Women’s Collective. The Siddis/Siddhis of Karnataka are descended from Bantu peoples from Southeast Africa that were brought to the Indian subcontinent as slaves by Portuguese merchants and Arab traders. The textile is informed by their backgrounds cultural identity. The work operates as an international social enterprise initiative to provide ethical, sustainable, and safe livelihood opportunity based work.
Rupa depicts individuals from the South Pacific Indian diaspora who create their own lives outside of traditional frameworks. Her work is located in diasporic history, the collective memory of her people- her exilic clan- from India as they recontextualise themselves into new cultures, thereby challenging an enforced national identity from where they came. Her film is an iconic work that expresses fundamental concerns of her artistic practice. Her film component Inheritance: A Lament disrupts the fundamental power of territory to determine identity. Redefining diaspora by breaking the simple sequence of explanatory links between place, location, and consciousness. Rupa’s film questions the role of identity, challenging how, for some, national identity is seen to be a political identity.
Research shows early Indian contact in Aotearoa New Zealand was in the late 18th Century. There is evidence that Indians had settled in Aotearoa with Maori in 1810. The collaboration pairs film-making with installation. Remnant is a multi-channel installation, a four volume epic exhibited with the textile language of embroidery from the Siddhi community, woven together within Singhs multi dimensional installation. The black and white remake of Rupa’s bio-epic Inheritance: A Lament uses footage shot in India of the artist’s extended family and clan. The family has a history in the West, with NZ Maori (indigenous) and NZ Europeans, for over 100 years. The descendents of this clan, most of whom were born in New Zealand, return to their Gujarat village for the purpose of exploring their indigenous ancestry. From a diverse, cultural mix this Indian-New Zealand artist’s footage is blended with Gujarati narration, Punjabi stanzas and Maori voice, as well as English subtitles.
This work positions a collective voice, handcrafted, assembled by many hands, that carry with them an ode to the domestic and global migrations, loaded with cultural nuance and a deep sense of fragility. Singh contributes to the preservation of Rupa's moving image content through objects that reinforce the collective narrative and personal experience of migration literally threaded together from different times and place. This multi perspective, multi narrative experience brings to light those whose stories have previously been not only unheard but also invisible through a myriad of visual language experiences.
