South Asian Immigrant Tales Written in Paint

India, Pakistan, Bangladesh…migrants from towns and villages, leaving everything behind to create something new, something of their own in America.

It’s all about journeys, about the lives you leave behind and the new ones you make. We’ve all got into a plane, left a place and arrived somewhere else. The baggage we’ve carried is physical things – loved old photographs and mementos, homemade garam masala – but it’s also about memories, lost homes and loved ones who are no longer with us.

The way artists deal with this excess baggage and physical and mental borders is through paint and canvas, creating a new reality which did not exist before. For the past ten years, IAAC’s  ‘Erasing Borders: has been giving this space to artists to share their creations and their innermost thoughts, and this year too artists participated in this long lasting celebration of  home and the world, as more and more artists take on the global trek.

Artists from India, Pakistan & Bangladesh

The artists include  Aaliyah Gupta, Anjali Deshmukh, Anujan Ezhikode, Avani Patel, Bivas Chaudhuri, Dhanashree Gadiyar, Ela Shah, Tara Sabharwal, Firoz Mahmud, George Ommen, MD Tokon, Mansoora Hassan, Mumtaz Hussain, Mustafa Faruki, Niamul Bari, Nirmal Raja, Parul Mehra, Pritika Chowdhry, Reet Das, Ruee Gawarikar,Sangeeta Reddy, Veru Narula, Alkananda Mukerji, Antonio Puri, Claudia Dias, Reeta Gidwani Kamarkar and Kulvinder Kaur Dhew.

So many names, so many different homes, different cities, different memories. All have converged in America.

South Asia in America

For each artist, it was a negotiated space, a place of their own, at home in the world. Here are the thoughts and input from some of the artists.

 Sangeeta Reddy came to the US in 1978 from  Hyderabad after studying in Bombay. Marriage brought her to a small town in Oklahoma: “Needless to say, it was a culture shock of an extremely unexpected kind! I now see myself as a hybrid, an Indo-American. My work comes from a place very close to my identity. My earliest influences were a curious mixture of Van Gogh, from when my father picked up a second hand book when I was 6 or 7 and Picasso, when I was 11.”    Reddy, who’s been the adjunct facility at Arapahoe Community College for 7 years, teaches drawing. She also is a writer who has written short stories and a novel. Her art has shown in Denver, Aspen as well as in India, most recently in Hyderabad.

Growing New Skin: Disguise, Camouflage, Whitewash

She says of her ‘Ellipse series, ” I believe that life cycles have a way of re-occurring.  Only, they never return in perfect circles, but in wobbly, misshapen ellipses, unexpectedly, unpredictably, and yet with a certain rhythm.  The shape has always been present in my work from the earliest tentative explorations of an identity of a Universal Soul or Brahman, into abstract shapes.

“The two aspects and layers of my work are deeply connected to the process with which we, as new immigrants, in a sense innocent and unaware,  are thrown into and then gradually throw on the skins we need to conceal ourselves to survive and navigate a new culture.  In that process it is necessary to feel the perceived insulation of disguise, of camouflage, the whitewash, and yet, the covering is often times inadequate and we may reveal more than we think; our skins are not as thick as we think, and are easily penetrated, bruised and lacerated.

In this process too, we are forever altered, not the heightened ‘global souls’ that we may imagine, but when we do return, in a state of a double exile, we have inevitably started a process where it starts again.  Cultures are cruel that way, and unforgiving to those who desert them and then return.”