Forget Me Forget Me Not, 2022
we.remain.in.multiple.motions, 2022
Single-channel video, (colour and sound), 12 min
_///plantationrender01.png, _///plantationrender02.png, _///plantationrender03.png, _///plantationrender04.png, 2022
White ink bitmap screenprint, sublimation print on satin, brushed aluminium backing
Solo Exhibition
Curated by Anca Rujoiu
Yeo Workshop Singapore
we.remain.in.multiple.motions, 2022
Single-channel video, (colour and sound), 12 min
_///plantationrender01.png, _///plantationrender02.png, _///plantationrender03.png, _///plantationrender04.png, 2022
White ink bitmap screenprint, sublimation print on satin, brushed aluminium backing
Solo Exhibition
Curated by Anca Rujoiu
Yeo Workshop Singapore
Link to Video
In Forget Me, Forget Me Not, Priyageetha Dia pursues a mindful encounter mediated by technology with colonial representations of labouring bodies. How does one attend to difficult imagery —visual and textual— that continues to dispossess colonial subjects of dignity and agency? Amid the sea of information and data prone to racialised terminology, what are the possibilities for an artistic engagement to eschew or hijack the perpetuation of violence? While the exhibition title calls to question what to remember and forget, it is concerned in equal manner with how to do it. Forget Me, Forget Me Not is a plea for new forms and ethics of remembrance by an artist whose use of technology consciously dismisses its claims to neutrality and immateriality.
The booklet “Labour in British Malaya” published in 1923 and authored by E. W. F. Gilman became Dia’s pivotal archival reference in the thinking process of this exhibition. The brochure provides an overview of the establishment and development of the Indian immigration fund administered by Gilman himself. Issued at a time when Malaya became the world's largest exporter of rubber, this pamphlet outlines the process that undergirded the large migration of workforce from the port of Madras (present-day Chennai) to different parts of Malaya. Gilman’s account includes one appendix that was supposedly addressed to the workers. In a promotional manner, this handout provides a range of information from the climate in Malaya to wages, working hours, health and education facilities— all those terms and conditions that controlled workers’ lives. Gilman ends the brochure admitting lightly that the text overall reflects “the standpoint of the employer rather than of the labourer". But where can one encounter the standpoint of the labourer? The labourer whose “unskilled” skills of tapping and weeding made Malaya the most profitable colony in the British Empire and the rubber plantations its largest moneymaking enterprise? Confronted with the blatant rhetorical performance of decent conditions of work in the description of what was otherwise an exploitative industry and the absence of labourers’ voices, the artist seeks throughout the exhibition the possibility of a counter-narrative.
Dia’s animation (we.remain.in.multiple.motions_Malaya) conjures the collective voice of the labourers into a poem that foregrounds the experience of sea travel and labour in the estates. This body of writing is constructed around a shared vocabulary across Tamil and Malay languages. A bilingual glossary permeates through the poem minimising the default monopoly of the English language and its capacity to homogenise voices and experiences. In counterpoint to the above official colonial account that reduced human lives to the mercantile speech of “supplies,” “insufficient quantity,” “defective quality,” “heavy cost of importation”, Dia infuses her writing with the scents of camphor, sesame oil, and sandalwood. The rhythmic pattern given by bodily sounds, breathing and heart beating is amplified by the musician Tesla Manaf’s percussion work. The artist’s poetic tone gives contextual specificity, sensorial imagery, and linguistic texture to the experience of sea-crossing and work in the plantations. The hybrid idiom of the narrating voice alludes to a postcolonial literary tradition that embraces complex experiences of displacement and belonging.
“In our tongues, we’re at the fertile frontier of codes, to hear a word among the exchanges of masters and slaves. Is this why my true mother tongue is poetry?” asks the poet Khal Torabully. “It is perhaps poetry’s ability to reach life to its core with an economy of means that compels Torabully. But it might be also poetry’s capacity to deploy, in his words, “baroquism”, an aesthetic strategy that embraces opacity and resists mono-semantic constructions of language and identities. Baroquism stands true to historical events that brought into contact “diverse mental structures, modes of life, languages and visions of the world." In a similar manner, interweaving language and imagery rich in texture, Dia’s animation has a touch of baroquism.
Echoing previous works by the artist (Blood Sun, 2022; Long Live the New Fle$h, 2020), the animation created for this exhibition features a single-computer generated protagonist with female bodily attributes. While CGI is often deployed in mass entertainment for naturalistic depictions of characters and believable performances, Dia’s protagonist never fully feels or aspires to be real. As viewers, we are constantly brought to acknowledge the protagonist’s discernable materiality. Whether gently touching the water, caressing the land or fur, and sensing the marks of incision on a rubber tree, the protagonist evokes, in the words of cultural theorist Laura U. Marks, an experience of haptic visuality. Marks defines this form of perception as a tactile mode of looking, a way in which the eyes use the organs of touch. The sense of haptic in the artist’s animation is amplified by her relinquishment of a linear perspective and resistance to depth vision to which Western’s modern traditions of representation are tied. Besides, the interactions between her protagonist and the environment enhance the haptic sensibility in the artist’s work. Transferring the ritual drawing of kolam that traditionally marks the thresholds of homes or the margins of the streets onto the body, the artist continuously strives to dissolve the boundaries between body and environment. This spatial merging is amplified in the architecture of the exhibition where enlarged hands on the wall guide, embrace, or entrap the viewers inside.
How does one reconcile the insistence on the materiality of the body with a choice of art made through digital imaging? How does one reconcile the history of the plantation labour market, a subject matter entrenched in histories of exploitation, with the usage of digital technology largely known for its commercial and military appliance? Dia’s work is defined by the consciousness that physical infrastructure underpins current technologies. None of the “algorithms, data, and cloud infrastructures,” could exist without earth’s minerals that are essential to any electronic components asserts the researcher Kate Crawford. Digital media relies on the convergence of natural resources, labour and geopolitical power. It is the tension between immateriality and materiality that echoes in the exhibition. Computer-generated imagery (CGI) sits in a continuum with other materials, from screen-printed works on latex, sublimation fabric prints to vinyl on walls and barren soil. The mechanisms of continuity are key to the artist’s argument: corporate digitisation and commodification of colonial archives contribute to a legacy of control and dispossession; digital technologies persist in the exploitation of natural resources and labour while concurrently obscuring their physical presence. This is further attested by Dia’s appropriation of stock images of Malayan rubber plantations that one can easily excavate from search engines.
By simply keying words such as “Malaya rubber”, “Malayan Rubber Plantation,” one can dig into a vast collection of stock photography. Stored, classified, and distributed by multi-national super-agencies—the largest being gettyimages, these images are part of a globalised photography industry. Their watermarks are embedded in the preview mode on each photograph these companies own marking a legacy of control and commodification of the labourers’ bodies with roots in plantation colonialism. Lynn Hollen Lees underlined that plantation industry in Malaya was a hierarchical and unequal system that cut across gender and ethnicity in all aspects of life, from the space the workers occupied, to the clothes they wore, and the food they ate. The control over the workers’ bodies extended to their representation whether through words or images. This mode of subordination took a visible form in the travellers’ diaries, plantation owners’ accounts and photographs that one can now purchase online. Sourcing images online, the artist has appropriated a series of trademarked photographs and imprinted them on latex using screenprinting, a printing technique associated with mass production. Printed with white ink on the off-white latex, the photographs gain spectral qualities. Details of workers sowing the soil in the estates, processing the rubber sheets disappear into the material. The hammock created out of stock photography and suspended across the gallery, becomes an archive of labouring bodies that are placed in the material they brought into existence.
When archives of colonial histories are filled with omissions, gaps, and prejudices, one has to acknowledge in the words of the writer Saidiya Hartnam, an impossibility. The impossibility to know what has not been told, recorded or experienced. The challenge, asserts Hartnam, is not to give voice to what remains untold, but rather to “imagine what cannot be verified”. Combining mass-production techniques such as screenprinting in the treatment of digitised archival photography, with the world-building and speculative capacities of CGI modelling, Forget Me, Forget Me Not posits that to resist forgetting, one needs to conjure new forms of telling.
In Forget Me, Forget Me Not, Priyageetha Dia pursues a mindful encounter mediated by technology with colonial representations of labouring bodies. How does one attend to difficult imagery —visual and textual— that continues to dispossess colonial subjects of dignity and agency? Amid the sea of information and data prone to racialised terminology, what are the possibilities for an artistic engagement to eschew or hijack the perpetuation of violence? While the exhibition title calls to question what to remember and forget, it is concerned in equal manner with how to do it. Forget Me, Forget Me Not is a plea for new forms and ethics of remembrance by an artist whose use of technology consciously dismisses its claims to neutrality and immateriality.
The booklet “Labour in British Malaya” published in 1923 and authored by E. W. F. Gilman became Dia’s pivotal archival reference in the thinking process of this exhibition. The brochure provides an overview of the establishment and development of the Indian immigration fund administered by Gilman himself. Issued at a time when Malaya became the world's largest exporter of rubber, this pamphlet outlines the process that undergirded the large migration of workforce from the port of Madras (present-day Chennai) to different parts of Malaya. Gilman’s account includes one appendix that was supposedly addressed to the workers. In a promotional manner, this handout provides a range of information from the climate in Malaya to wages, working hours, health and education facilities— all those terms and conditions that controlled workers’ lives. Gilman ends the brochure admitting lightly that the text overall reflects “the standpoint of the employer rather than of the labourer". But where can one encounter the standpoint of the labourer? The labourer whose “unskilled” skills of tapping and weeding made Malaya the most profitable colony in the British Empire and the rubber plantations its largest moneymaking enterprise? Confronted with the blatant rhetorical performance of decent conditions of work in the description of what was otherwise an exploitative industry and the absence of labourers’ voices, the artist seeks throughout the exhibition the possibility of a counter-narrative.
Dia’s animation (we.remain.in.multiple.motions_Malaya) conjures the collective voice of the labourers into a poem that foregrounds the experience of sea travel and labour in the estates. This body of writing is constructed around a shared vocabulary across Tamil and Malay languages. A bilingual glossary permeates through the poem minimising the default monopoly of the English language and its capacity to homogenise voices and experiences. In counterpoint to the above official colonial account that reduced human lives to the mercantile speech of “supplies,” “insufficient quantity,” “defective quality,” “heavy cost of importation”, Dia infuses her writing with the scents of camphor, sesame oil, and sandalwood. The rhythmic pattern given by bodily sounds, breathing and heart beating is amplified by the musician Tesla Manaf’s percussion work. The artist’s poetic tone gives contextual specificity, sensorial imagery, and linguistic texture to the experience of sea-crossing and work in the plantations. The hybrid idiom of the narrating voice alludes to a postcolonial literary tradition that embraces complex experiences of displacement and belonging.
“In our tongues, we’re at the fertile frontier of codes, to hear a word among the exchanges of masters and slaves. Is this why my true mother tongue is poetry?” asks the poet Khal Torabully. “It is perhaps poetry’s ability to reach life to its core with an economy of means that compels Torabully. But it might be also poetry’s capacity to deploy, in his words, “baroquism”, an aesthetic strategy that embraces opacity and resists mono-semantic constructions of language and identities. Baroquism stands true to historical events that brought into contact “diverse mental structures, modes of life, languages and visions of the world." In a similar manner, interweaving language and imagery rich in texture, Dia’s animation has a touch of baroquism.
Echoing previous works by the artist (Blood Sun, 2022; Long Live the New Fle$h, 2020), the animation created for this exhibition features a single-computer generated protagonist with female bodily attributes. While CGI is often deployed in mass entertainment for naturalistic depictions of characters and believable performances, Dia’s protagonist never fully feels or aspires to be real. As viewers, we are constantly brought to acknowledge the protagonist’s discernable materiality. Whether gently touching the water, caressing the land or fur, and sensing the marks of incision on a rubber tree, the protagonist evokes, in the words of cultural theorist Laura U. Marks, an experience of haptic visuality. Marks defines this form of perception as a tactile mode of looking, a way in which the eyes use the organs of touch. The sense of haptic in the artist’s animation is amplified by her relinquishment of a linear perspective and resistance to depth vision to which Western’s modern traditions of representation are tied. Besides, the interactions between her protagonist and the environment enhance the haptic sensibility in the artist’s work. Transferring the ritual drawing of kolam that traditionally marks the thresholds of homes or the margins of the streets onto the body, the artist continuously strives to dissolve the boundaries between body and environment. This spatial merging is amplified in the architecture of the exhibition where enlarged hands on the wall guide, embrace, or entrap the viewers inside.
How does one reconcile the insistence on the materiality of the body with a choice of art made through digital imaging? How does one reconcile the history of the plantation labour market, a subject matter entrenched in histories of exploitation, with the usage of digital technology largely known for its commercial and military appliance? Dia’s work is defined by the consciousness that physical infrastructure underpins current technologies. None of the “algorithms, data, and cloud infrastructures,” could exist without earth’s minerals that are essential to any electronic components asserts the researcher Kate Crawford. Digital media relies on the convergence of natural resources, labour and geopolitical power. It is the tension between immateriality and materiality that echoes in the exhibition. Computer-generated imagery (CGI) sits in a continuum with other materials, from screen-printed works on latex, sublimation fabric prints to vinyl on walls and barren soil. The mechanisms of continuity are key to the artist’s argument: corporate digitisation and commodification of colonial archives contribute to a legacy of control and dispossession; digital technologies persist in the exploitation of natural resources and labour while concurrently obscuring their physical presence. This is further attested by Dia’s appropriation of stock images of Malayan rubber plantations that one can easily excavate from search engines.
By simply keying words such as “Malaya rubber”, “Malayan Rubber Plantation,” one can dig into a vast collection of stock photography. Stored, classified, and distributed by multi-national super-agencies—the largest being gettyimages, these images are part of a globalised photography industry. Their watermarks are embedded in the preview mode on each photograph these companies own marking a legacy of control and commodification of the labourers’ bodies with roots in plantation colonialism. Lynn Hollen Lees underlined that plantation industry in Malaya was a hierarchical and unequal system that cut across gender and ethnicity in all aspects of life, from the space the workers occupied, to the clothes they wore, and the food they ate. The control over the workers’ bodies extended to their representation whether through words or images. This mode of subordination took a visible form in the travellers’ diaries, plantation owners’ accounts and photographs that one can now purchase online. Sourcing images online, the artist has appropriated a series of trademarked photographs and imprinted them on latex using screenprinting, a printing technique associated with mass production. Printed with white ink on the off-white latex, the photographs gain spectral qualities. Details of workers sowing the soil in the estates, processing the rubber sheets disappear into the material. The hammock created out of stock photography and suspended across the gallery, becomes an archive of labouring bodies that are placed in the material they brought into existence.
When archives of colonial histories are filled with omissions, gaps, and prejudices, one has to acknowledge in the words of the writer Saidiya Hartnam, an impossibility. The impossibility to know what has not been told, recorded or experienced. The challenge, asserts Hartnam, is not to give voice to what remains untold, but rather to “imagine what cannot be verified”. Combining mass-production techniques such as screenprinting in the treatment of digitised archival photography, with the world-building and speculative capacities of CGI modelling, Forget Me, Forget Me Not posits that to resist forgetting, one needs to conjure new forms of telling.
- Text by Anca Rujoiu