‘From Your Eyes to Ours’ at Coda Culture

Returning Gazes: Strategies and Foundations
By Chand Chandramohan

‘From Your Eyes to Ours’ is running from 6 to 20 December 2019 at Coda Culture featuring Singapore’s first contemporary art event with an all-South Asian line-up. The event comprises of a visual arts exhibition entitled ‘Yes, I Speak Indian’, a film screening of ‘Between Pudukkottai and Singapore – Poems by N. Rengarajan’ directed by Vishal Daryanomel and produced by Shameen/Sifar, a performance art piece ‘7.35%’ featuring artists Div, Chand Chandramohan, Priyageetha Dia, and Shameen/Sifar, as well as a workshop titled ‘Wokeshop: Strategies for Creating and Maintaining Space’.

Since independence, Singapore’s demographics has been categorised by the Chinese-Malay-Indian-Other (CMIO) system. As of 2018, 76.2% of the population is Chinese. Reflecting these numbers, many of Singapore’s art spaces feature mostly Chinese artists. In recent years, artists and curators have made efforts to create events and exhibitions focused on minority identities. However, South Asian artists have so far not been part of this increased visibility, and this is what I, along with my co-organisers Seelan Palay and Divaagar, sought to address with ‘From Your Eyes to Ours’.

‘From Your Eyes to Ours’, 2019, exhibition installation view. Image courtesy of Coda Culture.

We decided to take a pluralistic approach in working with the term ‘Indian’, which has reduced South Asian identities into an effectively single narrative at the state level. Seelan’s established practices of organising shows within Coda Culture informed the structure of this event. He wanted to include a variety of artists, especially young artists, to confront the hegemonies of hierarchical structures practiced in Singapore’s art spaces. My main motivation was to create a safe space for Singaporean artists of South Asian descent to confide in each other. From that initial stage of organisation, we came up with the working title ‘From Our Eyes to Yours’ but we were not quite comfortable with it for it seemed to imply that our artists would want their audience to see something. At the same time, it also had the potential to relate to an exploration of power dynamics through the site of the gaze, and we could use the subversion of these power dynamics to examine our South Asian identity within Singapore.

In ‘Black Looks: Race and Representation’ (1999), bell hooks described the oppositional gaze as one “wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other, but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see”. The oppositional gaze was critical in shifting the direction we were working towards, no longer reflecting, but to respond. We needed this event to be first and foremost a site of agency. As people with a marginalised identity, we have learnt to navigate structures and spaces, and often, “gazes” are sites of agency within the complexities of marginalised experience. With this event, we aimed to materialise pockets of agency where artists were allowed to interrogate the gaze and may choose to reclaim the power to return these gazes back to the audience. This materialised in two distinct strategies: direct confrontation and silent occupancy.

In a multi-object installation titled after a quote from hooks’ writing, ‘quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power and pleasure’, Priyageetha presents a display of objects including specks of her signature gold foil, charcoal, and a black blow-up doll. Priyageetha employs this body as a substitute site for violence that dark-skinned femme bodies face. The body here, though inanimate, with no eyes and on its knees, cements itself in the space as an arresting presence, gazing back at the viewer.

Divaagar, ‘Why this கோழி கறி di?’, 2019, aroma diffuser and curry. Image courtesy of Coda Culture.

Other works, such as Divaagar’s “Why this கோழி கறி di?”, enacts resistance more stealthily. At the threshold of the space it occupies, the work mists the exhibition with the scent of curry, a dish well associated with the South Asian community. This incites varying reactions from audiences, depending on their tolerance to spice. The gesture of inculcating smell into the space is a simple and powerful one, for how it permeates, and for the fact that the sense of smell is more closely linked to memory than other senses. The work also employs Tamil text, alienating people who do not know the written language, including myself, to the pun of the title. Here, the power of gazing back is also having the power to be seen on our own terms.

Div, ‘Artist/Angrygirl/ கோப்ப்பொண்ணு’, 2019, mixed media on watercolour paper (inside), and ‘Ritual Labour’, 2019, saree cloth, embroidery thread, scrap fabric (outside). Image courtesy of Coda Culture.

The weight of tradition was an important voice that needed to be shown within the context of the show, and Div’s ‘Ritual Labour’, which utilises saree fabrics passed down generationally and cut and sewn them together into a soft sculpture resembling sand bags, represents this well. The act of art-making is also a cathartic one, and artists such as Muda demonstrate this through decorative paintings that contemplate their race, religion and gender identity to tell their stories.  

This is the first step to representing the South Asian community beyond the majority Tamil group in the Singapore art scene. It has been a space where we could confide in each other the experiences we’ve encountered and sometimes had to endure in our personal and working lives. It has allowed for humour, solace, contemplation and healing, and we will continue to work on being more inclusive of other voices and perspectives in the exhibitions and programmes we are already planning.