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text by Anca Rujoiu
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.
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The booklet “Labour in British Malaya” published in 1923 and authored by E. W. F. Gilman is a pivotal archival reference for this exhibition. It provides an overview of the establishment and development of the Indian immigration fund administered by Gilman himself. Issued at a time when Malaya was the world's largest exporter of rubber, this pamphlet outlines the process that undergirded a large migration of workforce from the port of Madras (present-day Chennai) to different parts of Malaya. Gilman’s account includes an 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 ended the brochure admitting lightly that his text overall reflected “the standpoint of the employer rather than the labourer". But where can one encounter the standpoint of the labourer? The labourer deemed “unskilled” and yet, their tapping and weeding made Malaya the most profitable colony in the British Empire and the rubber plantations its largest money making enterprise. Confronted by the performative rhetoric of decent working conditions in what was otherwise an exploitative industry and by an absence of labourers’ voices, the artist sought the possibility of a counter-narrative throughout the exhibition.
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Forget Me, Forget Me Not: Text by Anca Rujoiu
Past viewing_room