RAJNI PERERA AND NEP SIDHU: ON WORLD MAKING

Negarra A. Kudumu November 11, 2019

‘There is no end to what a living world will demand of you.’

-Octavia Butler, “Parable of the Sower”

Banners for New Empires marks the first museum exhibition featuring the works of Rajni Perera and Nep Sidhu in conversation and in collaboration. Beyond highlighting the practices of two emerging artists who are steadily ascending within and beyond the Canadian art world, this show offers intimate insights into the artists' respective positions on ancestral legacies as well as the Anthropocene and post-Anthropocene (if there is such a thing). This exhibition asserts possibilities for those deemed the subaltern to leverage the power and knowledge coded within their bones, blood, and sinew to self-determine their lives at the level of the individual, the community, society, and civilization. While yes, these works offer hints into possible futures, these works and their resultant discourses are the fruits of the present. Worldbuilding is now and ongoing. Through textile, painting, sculpture, and installation Perera and Sidhu have literally and figuratively constructed entities, architecture, vestments, poetry, and rituals that further explicate the tone and tenor of this world as it is forming in the now. There are hints, direct and indirect, to their own cultures pointing to an unspoken, perhaps not even completely conscious, engagement with their respective bloods’ memory. There is also a very conscious and intentional inclusion of elements that speak to the aesthetic potentialities of the new world that Perera and Sidhu envision. Whatever this process may entail, however grinding it may be, this new world is where the subaltern, freedom fighters, artists, hierophants, and so-called subversives can thrive authentically and in harmony with their social, spiritual, and natural environments. It is, yet again, a new beginning in a new place, drawing upon cultural continuua created in an ancient omniscient past, which knew the now was then, already in the making.

Ancestral Wisdom

Nep Sidhu’s works exist in the crosshairs of many mediums weaved  multidisciplinarily with a throughline that always points back to his personal lived experience as a Sikh. When thinking of building a new world one organically thinks about those that are already in existence. Good, bad, or indifferent we default to what we know even if only to use it as a springboard for departing on a new journey. To that end, Sidhu returns time and time again, poetically but overtly, to the philosophy and ethics of Sikhi as counsel for a way forward.Newer works such as “Nirankar Object in the Sound of Ek” (2019) and “In the Melody of Sacrifice Let Us Learn Your Chant” (2018) speak to potency of aural utterance made visual through steel and textile for uplifting the name of a singular divine. Whether that divine is known as Nirankar, Kalunga, Ahura Mazda, or simply the Universe, it is experienced as the creative demiurge, which pushed forth and sustained all life. Without this demiurge there can be no new world, and it is the ability to make sound unite into object, that will serve as a reminder that there are people who through their faith in the divine are able to manifest a world. “Confirmation B” and “Confirmation C” (2013-2016) constitute two thirds of a triptych, which together with the 2016 work “Divine of Form 7A (A Song for Rana)” speak directly to notions of memory, ancestralization, and the consequences for abandoning our ancestral traditions. Where “Confirmation B” makes visual incantation necessary to support the transcendence of our dearly departed and allow the living a special sacred language with which to continue to communicate with them, “Confirmation C” retells the story “Curse Words” written by Sidhu’s collaborator Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes. “Curse Words” recounts the adverse consequences Chief Si’ahl’s seventh son experienced for rejecting his ancestral inheritance. It is a precautionary tale that those who endeavor to build a new world should hold dear, “Divine of Form 7A” is an act of devotion, praise, and wake work performed by Sidhu for his deceased brother. Wake work is a term coined by American scholar Christina Sharpe that simultaneously refers to mourning rituals but also the experience of aliveness and consciousness, however painful, that is felt by those that actively grieve their dead. A new world is an opportunity for transformation but because of continuum, life will persist. With that comes death, and often it is unexpected and undeserved. It is through active remembering - devotion, praise, and wake work - that our deceased, though formless, persist and continue to guide us as we make our new world.

There are three figures that serve as a tribute to the original people of the vast territories known as Canada and the United States, but who also serve as exemplars of the kinds of people who should be central to any world building endeavor: women. Made in conjunction with collaborator Nicholas Galanin, these three figures comprise a series titled “No Pigs in Paradise”, which pays homage to  Native American and First Nations women who to date continue to be disproportionatley victimized through rape and homicide. In Canada as of 2017, First Nations Women represented 4% of all women but represented 22% of all homicide victims, were three times more likely to be the victims of male partner violence, and comprise 42% of the population of imprisoned women. The data in the United States is equally as damning: as of 2007 it was reported by Amnesty International that one third of all Native American women will be raped in her lifetime, Native women are 2.5 times more likely to be raped compared to women of other ethic groups, and 86% of these rapes are committed by non-Native men. These statistics represent ongoing human rights violations intentionally visited upon Native American and First Nations women with legacies that date back to the very beginning of settler colonialism in North America. The message emanating from Sidhu and Galanin’s figures is crystalline: any new world that will thrive must re-center women as the pillars of our new world. Women  must be protected and the divine feminine must be venerated and through these acts healing, harmony, and justice can be assured.

Post-Apocalyptic Remains

Both Perera and Sidhu look to the past for lessons on how to build their new world; however, Perera’s lens considers a reality that is neither wholly antecedent nor postscript, but rather it is actual: the collapse of our environment. Perera’s proposal for the future presumes a present that will soon be no more. In fact, the apocalypse is the present and insights into a post-apocalyptic tomorrow are ubiquitous. The works in this exhibition derive from three of Perera’s series “Traveller”, “(M)otherworld”, and “Banners for New Empires” for which this exhibition is named. “Banners for New Empires” was initially presented as a part of the group exhibition “Believe” at the Museum of Contemporary Art In Toronto (MOCA) in 2018. These three series can be interpreted as Perera’s thought trajectory made visible - a guidebook if you will - bookended on one side by the present demise of our current excessively decadent where we have dethroned and corrupted the ancient ways such that civilization can only fall apart. Those left, mutate into humanoid beings as depicted in “Banner 1” and Banner 2”. Problematic gender and race binaries begin to disintegrate as we return to a more elemental existence that recalls an original ancestor, the (M)other from whom we all emerge and who we recall and call upon in times of great upheaval, such as the fall of an empire. 

But why, precisely, is this empire cum apocalypse happening now? It is, in part, collapsing due to the extreme excess and overuse - if not abuse - of our earth for simple convenience. Innovations in travel have allowed people to criss cross the globe in two days when just a century ago that voyage would have taken months. The technology of flight depends on fuel extracted in large quantities, unsustainably from the earth, and redeployed into the environment in the form of pollutants that degrade our air quality, and have increased CO2 emissions to dangerous levels. Cell phones that allow us to quickly and easily keep in contact with loved ones require bauxite to function. Bauxite and other minerals have been unsustainably mined for centuries in Central Africa, which maintains an exploitative history that points very clearly to abusive colonial legacies that still have not been healed. These facts are very neatly contained in a shiny package serving as a symbol of the ways in which consumerism in the form of fast technology can blind us to the nefarious realities of human existence. Ironically, science fiction as a genre has always been in conversation about these issues particularly where the abuse and misuse of technology is concerned. In Perera’s works we see entities that have mutated in form and function to be able to sustain life in spite of socio-environmental conditions that have collapsed and our dying. The emergence of the (M)other, which Perera offers as a prevision in the “Banners for New Empires” series is the necessary developmental stage because it gives form to the timeless adage that things fall apart. This undoing emerges when we are out of sync, when we are in denial of who we are and that which is truly important. It is a sign that the apocalypse is ramping up and running its course. The (M)otherworld phase is a necessary prerequisite as it is the potent period where birthing and rebuilding gather momentum and set a course. Because of its creative potency, the (M)other is the only class of being that can fathom and exist in the apocalypse. Though conceptions of gender and sex start to morph and mutate at this point in Perera’s ideation, the (M)other figure and the apocalypse in which it thrives are decidedly fecund - they conceive and they birth and the fruits of those labors are the Traveller. 

By the time  Traveller lands, the post-apocalyptic world is in full flourish and we see the travellers in their integral glory as power beings possessing animal like qualities, lush and majestic like “the colors found in the center of the oldest, uninhabited forests, the highest altitudes of the sky, and the deepest depths of the oceans.” The travellers are the descendants and reincarnations of the aforementioned subaltern - the immigrants of past worlds and empires, third culture people, and otherwise marginalized groups. They are of the post-apocalyptic landscape and working in sync with it. They carry within their bodies a resilience that hails from their predecessors ability to live within the decay of the previous world. They are inwardly oriented, meaning their focus is on the world they are building, their kin, and community. They are neither naive nor ignorant to the realities of their conception. They are the offspring of a (M)other which birthed them at the apex of the apocalypse and thus they carry with them the tools and protection necessary to withstand those conditions, should they ever manifest again.

“Revenge 3” depicts one such tool: a copper colored wrist encircled by multi-colored bracelets from which a hand and spindling fingers emerge. On the index finger there is a brass that extends approximately 10 inches from base to tip. The hand is positioned so elegantly beckoning onlookers to move closer and look more intently. A closer inspection reveals that this is as much an aesthetic instrument as it is a practical one. Birds of prey use talons to hook into the flesh of their prey to at first restrain them, and eventually kill. Harsh though it may seem, the travellers are children of the apocalypse. There is genetic and ancestral memory of the calamitous conditions that ushered in their birth. They emerged from a world that turned on itself and imploded when harmony could no longer exist. They are building a new world and in order to survive they must be able to protect themselves knowing that eventually, even if it will take tens of millenia, this world too, could self-destruct.  

Coda

The salience of Banners for New Empires lies in its ability to think with our current social and environmental conditions, think about the historical trajectories of our lineage ancestors and ancient spiritual traditions, and produce results that urge us toward the creation of new conditions in which we can thrive in harmony with each other and within our shared environment. Those results are the building blocks of the new world. Perera and Sidhu’s offerings reveal a new world that is aesthetically profligate; however, not decontextualized from the apocalypse that preceded. In Perera and Sidhu’s world, the new inhabitants possess a steely confidence as do all survivors of cataclysmic conditions. There is also an intense and active remembering of the ways their ancient antecedents who in their time were also tasked with the demands of world making. As it was previously it shall be going forward, this new world will be the best place. In it we will be able to thrive, be protected, and cultivate harmonious existence. This is the raucous call to arms demanded of those tasked with constructing a new world. 

Footnotes

  1.  An ancestral, genetically encoded connection to one’s cultural practices that one knows, feels, and executes without having been instructed.

  2. A Kikongo word that references the ocean as the creative demiurge par excellence. Also a conceptual reference to the ocean as the place where innumerable dead reside

  3. The name for God within the Zoroastrian spiritual tradition.

  4. A reference to the American scholar, Christina Sharpe’s concept of mourning the dead as described in her 2014 journal article “Black Studies: In the Wake”

  5.  Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter “Stats About Indigenous women in Canada” rapereliefshelter.bc.ca. https://www.rapereliefshelter.bc.ca/blog/stats-about-indigenous-women-canada (accessed November 7, 2019)

  6. Amnesty International “Addressing Epidemic of Sexual Violence Against Native Women in the US) amnestyusa.org. https://www.amnestyusa.org/addressing-epidemic-of-sexual-violence-against-native-women-in-us/ (accessed November 7, 2019)

  7. Kudumu, Negarra A. Traveller Persists, 2019