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Title: 'Mixed Tongues' Catalogue no: 4400 Medium/Material: Size (inch):
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Among the many challenges an artist faces surely the greatest is to transpose authenticity of experience into artistically unequivocal form. Sher Rajah has succeeded in doing so where he and other immigrant artists in Britain today face a particularly arduous task: they must be cognisant of their own inheritance and simultaneously allow their identity to be shaped by the present. For Rajah, work is a matter of exploring the distinctiveness and artistic potential of that situation. He does so through performance, installation, video and 2-D projects – a range of media questioning orthodox art historical categories. Bold and subtle, punchy and mature, his work deals with issues of communication or, put differently, with interrelated facts of human sensibility. Because of the richness of their implications and acuity of the questions they post perhaps the silent video Forever and Ever ((8 mins. 1989) and the 1991 installation Mixed Tongues created for the Harris Museum Preston, are especially characteristic of his art. While touching on biographical experience, both address much wider issues: that of how cultural traditions penetrate our handling of the present, for example, correlated to that of the import of language and writing in particular. This may lead one to expect a highly complicated instrumentation of motifs and formal elements. But Rajah masters conciseness with ease: his works are what I would like to call eloquently laconic. Thus, in Forever and Ever we momentarily confront a black screen which a grid makes look like reinforced glass. A shadow glides across the top, a hand appears and begins writing a family register. The action is inverse to the viewer, suggesting displacement and polarisation. Soon water invades the writing, the ink dissolves, fluctuating patterns of blots start to form where the letters float and liquidize – and the hand traces and retraces the words, labouring to retain and reascertain their meaning. Two years later in Mixed Tongues is a work in which layers of meaning interrelate in complex ways, yet at the same time it is lucidly simple, foregrounding individual veracity as underpinned by our understanding of the past. The ‘God’, written in huge calligraphic letters onto each of the walls of a gallery space – in Greek on the first, Hebrew on the second, Arabic and Sanskrit on the third and fourth side of the room - is what one sees at the opening of the exhibition. During its course, the gallery technicians are charged with painting over the words back to the bare walls until nothing remains but a photographic record. As a work about human faith, and about human belief that such faith can be expressed in writing Mixed Tongues centres on differences between cultural traditions and between religions. Questioning the artist’s place in view of such differences, Rajah in Mixed Tongues arrives at the clear-cut statement that art testifies to, and is a matter of, faith, of belief, of conscience. At the same time, however, as a temporary installation Mixed Tongues makes a man’s (and implicitly, history’s) power over art tangible. But its inherent import renders such power at the very best transient: Art is indeed a matter of faith. Ultimately, what we go away with will be decided by what we have dared to ask. Dr. Ursula Seibold Dr. Ursual Seibold is an art historian who teaches at the University of Munster, Germany and also works as a freelance journalist. |
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