In Forget Me, Forget Me Not, Priyageetha Dia brings herself in pursuit of 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 disposess colonial subjects of dignity and agency?
Priyageetha Dia transmutes traces, visual and textual that document the history of Indian labourers in rubber plantations in Malaya, into a totalising sensory environment. To oppose forgetting, the artist suggests, we need new forms of telling. We also need, the artists persists, an ethics of remembrance that does not perpetuate the violence to which historical documentation is tied. Combining computer-generated imagery with printed works on latex and satin, Dia constructs another type of archive. In this archive, narratives of exploitation of labour and natural resources are imprinted on land, rubber, and labourers’ bodies showing the continuities in the present and near future of past histories.
Curated by Anca Rujoiu
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