Nina Mangalanayagam, Friday 10th January 2014, 10.30am - 12pm, Goldsmiths, MRB Screen 3
© Nina Mangalanayagam
My research and practice takes its
starting point in the personal. It came out of the frustration
of not finding artworks and theory resonating with my personal
experience of having conflicting narratives, being a mix between a
white and a black parent. And also by the difficulty making
photographs on this experience, without falling into a metalanguage
of hybridity. My research contributes to a re-reading of hybridity in
photographic art, where the racial Hybrid is involved in a
complicated struggle between its histories as both coloniser and
colonised.
My practice involves
placing myself in situations and locations within my cultural and
familial structure to reflect on my position. The main focus is on
how other people’s perception of me influences my relationship with
others. I expose how internal contradictions mirror external
cross-cultural complications. My presentation focused on We
call her Pulle - a three screen video
installation in progress on my experience returning to Jaffna in Sri
Lanka, the childhood place of my father. For most of my life, I had
no access to this place due to the civil war. Having only visited
once before my memory and image of the place is partly imagined
through stories from my father and from the Western society I grew up
in. My process includes deconstructing my idea of the past, while
simultaneously attempting to re-construct it from the ruins and
traces I find. The video focuses on my relationship to my aunt,
Pulle, and
her house.
The
final piece aims to contest ideas of origin, stories we tell
ourselves about ourselves, and question assumptions and attitudes
that I have brought with me from my background. I expose how the
hybrid also needs to assess their presumptions and stereotypes of
others.
www.ninamanga.com
January 2014: Making history, CAB 2014 - Colombo Biennale, Sri Lanka
January 2014: Making history, CAB 2014 - Colombo Biennale, Sri Lanka
June 2013: Land/Home, Michealis Galleries, University of Cape Town, South Africa
