10 Questions with Kinnari Saraiya

Kinnari Saraiya was born in Bombay, India, and moved to Britain to study for Bachelor’s in Fine Art at Arts University Bournemouth. Having grown up with the stories of the colonial empire told by her grandfather, who has seen the sunset on the empire and the effects of it today, she is fascinated by the physical evidence of this history in the landscape of India and England. Kinnari brings architectural structures drenched in historical violence to the fore and allows them to present their historical struggle. It voices a counterculture of stories that depicts the dysfunctions of the world and forces a new type of meaning to be created through her work.

She was awarded the Dean’s Prize for innovative use of materials at graduation by Paul Gough, Vice-Chancellor of Arts University Bournemouth, for her work ‘Victoria Terminus’. Ever since she has received the Runners Up Award at An Indian Summer Festival and was shortlisted for the New Emergence Art Unity Award, she has exhibited nationally and internationally in various locations across the United Kingdom, Venice, India, and United States. Some of her notable group shows were held at London Metropolitan University in collaboration with the British Council in 2020, Doug Adams Gallery in California in 2020, and Fort Mason Centre for Arts and Culture in San Francisco in 2017. Her upcoming works, following residencies in Russia, United States, United Kingdom, and Austria, will be in exhibition across 2021 and 2022.

www.kinnarisaraiya.com | @kinnarisaraiya

To the privileged | DESCRIPTION

"To the privileged" is an artwork consisting of four equally important aspects. Firstly, it's vital to mention the exhibition's location as it's the vessel that carries the artwork. The exhibition took place outside the Giardini in Venice, one of the main locations of the Venice Biennale. Then the passport book itself consists of a piece of text explaining passport privilege. The rest of the pages include 15 countries represented at the Venice Biennale and their global passport rank, a stamp dated back to 1414. This is when the first passport was issued by King Henry V in England and a washed-out image of the country's artistic representation in their national pavilion at the Venice Biennale. This is important because pavilions housed at the Giardini are owned by the exhibiting country, and stepping into the pavilion would essentially mean stepping into that country's border. 

Confronting Passport Privilege, a privilege based on the origin of an individual's passport that either makes the world for them borderless or full of obstacles. If born in the 'wrong' country, they'd have to prove their decency as humans at every step outside that country. Passport privilege remains an entirely unaddressed, conveniently overlooked inequality that defines every single immigration debate and crisis of movement. It is important to recognize these inequalities and the contribution they make in producing a world in which the 'high powers' are freer to move. The hierarchy is clearly laid out in 'Global Passport Rank' as common sense. 

As small a step as it is, the Venice Biennale brings together 89 countries on one land, accessible through one ticket. It was a liberating experience for someone with a lower passport rank to feel like an equal in the contemporary art world, if not the globalized world. 

INTERVIEW

You are very young, but you have already worked and exhibited extensively. When did you decide to become an artist, and how did you start experimenting with art?

A: As romanticized as this sounds, art felt like my calling. I realized that art has the potential to change the world without actually changing the world. It lets us imagine a world where hierarchies were different, humanity was restored, and climate was unaltered without committing to these ideas of radical change. It does not have to change the physicality of the world we live in; it changes the mentalities of the people we live with. There’s plenty I agree to disagree with within the way the world works, made clear by my own experiences, so this is my way of reconciling with it. 

I talk about the modern-day whitewashing of cultural identity and heritage quite a lot in my work, and this rises from the conveniently adjusted story that is history. For me, I grew up around colonial remnants in Bombay, not necessarily celebrated but existed. Some of these were worn down, very reflective of the time that has passed since independence. But as soon as I moved to London for further studies, I was suddenly surrounded by a different narrative of history. My history books in school told me that Winston Churchill was responsible for the genocide that was the Bengal Famine, but the British landscape reflected him to be the hero of the nation. Queen Victoria’s plinth remains intentionally empty in Bombay, but the Victoria Memorial in London remains a historic landmark.

Realizing that the colonial statues and what they represent can somehow become the sanitizers of truth has questioned my memory surrounding the Empire. 

What do you wish you knew about Contemporary Art before you got started?

That lived experiences are just as important as theory. I wish I knew earlier that universality is a myth, an oppressive one at that. I truly believe that the more intricate and deeply felt a work of art is, the more power it has to move us. 

You work with many different mediums, from sculpture and mixed media drawings to performance and digital gif animations. How do you choose your mediums, and what significance do they have for you?

As Marshall McLuhan puts it in a lot of my works, 'the medium is the message.' They add their metaphor. When I'm addressing monuments and their ideological permanence, it's important for me to use a material that corrodes with time and reflects the temporality of these structures. I use charcoal to draw broken, ruined statues, knowing that charcoal rubs off with time and contact, portraying impermanence. I create GIF animations because it loops endlessly, blurring the border between the start and finish, hence blurring the metaphorical boundary between the past, present, and the future. 

I restrict myself from defining my art practice through one medium, sculpture/performance/digital, etc, cause they couldn't be more intertwined. While our digital experience of art can be performance art in a sculptural space, these performances collide with sculptural debris everywhere, even under our feet. It's almost impossible to tell where one medium ends and the other begins, giving birth to a new medium. 

Decolonizing materiality in contemporary art, I hero chili powder to reflect domesticity and a sense of home through a vibrantly red and hot spice, symbolizing violence. It's a spice that clouds the aroma of every home in India, and it's the spices that lured the British to 'discover' India and make it their home. 

Through the materiality of my mediums, my work becomes an exchange between visuality and opacity, permanence and temporality, visibility and invisibility, presence and absence. 

In your works, you address the post-colonial discourse, reflecting on history and its traces. How much do you think personal history influences your work as an artist?

Having grown up with the stories of the colonial empire told by my grandfather, who has seen the sunset on the empire and its effects today, I am fascinated by the physical evidence of this history in the landscape of India and England. Architectural landmarks are a visual emblem of the empire, even after its demise. These landmarks were built before our being, becoming a portal into the past and will be there after our being, depicting the future. I'm keen on listening to the voices that these concrete structures echo, of the conversations that sealed the fate of the empire or the celebration on the day of independence or the moment of realization that although independent, could we ever decolonize the mind? 

I've always been very aware of my mismatched identity of being an Indian but speaking the colonizer's tongue as my own, perhaps reclaimed. It becomes a reminder that the end of oppression was not the end of the problem; these histories are still felt in the fabric of contemporary society. That the ruins still live on.

What other themes do you pursue? And where do you find inspiration?

For the purpose of my education, I had been outside of India for three years before I decided to come back for a month's holiday. This is important because as Neri Oxman says 'You have to go away to come back home. You never truly have a sense of home until you leave home.' So when I did come back, I saw home from a whole new perspective. Things that I had gotten used to in my landscape became more evident than ever before. One such architectural marvel that had receded in the background of my everyday life was the Victoria Terminus building in Bombay, now called Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. Named after Queen Victoria and built to commemorate her Golden Jubilee as the Empress of India, her statue was placed at the center of the building in a niche. After independence, either the statue went missing, or the government took it down, but there's no trace of it, except the silhouette left by the algae grown around it. This drove me to create work that replicates the plinth where she once stood and actively rejects her presence on it. Arising from the idea of home, I painted the plinth in Chili Powder. It's a spice that clouds the aroma of every home in India, and it's the spices that lured the British to 'discover' India and make it their home. This process created my work' Victoria Terminus'. 

How did you come up with the idea for your performance work "to the privileged"? And how much did being in Venice for the Biennale influence the work?

I was selected to work at the British Pavilion during the 58th Venice Biennale by the British Council. It was a Stewarding and Research Fellowship that allowed us to spend half our time invigilating and caring for the artwork housed in the pavilion, and the other half we could research about our proposed project. While working, I found that the British Pavilion building and land in Giardini is owned by Britain, which essentially means that stepping into the pavilion would mean stepping into that country's territory. 

When the Venice Biennale was set up, during the first wave of globalization, the right for cultural autonomy remained a privilege of colonial powers, which colonized the Giardini with permanent pavilions. In contrast, the 'others' were left scrambling. Human civilization is built on a history of spatial control; the territoriality of national boundaries is a clear example on a global scale controlled by a little book with incredible powers, the passport. It's one that we often hide away in the depth of our closet, like every discriminating debate that comes with it. 

So presenting this work outside the Giardini, outside the territory of privilege, in the form of a passport that mentions the 'Global Passport Rank' of the exhibiting countries in the Biennale, becomes the start of a conversation. 

What do you hope that the public takes away from this work?

Often when you're born into a system that works in a certain way, you're told not to question it because it is what it is, and sometimes you don't because you've not known a reality different from it. I don't believe that those countries lower down in the list of Global Passport Rank were there from the moment of discovery, and I don't mean discovery by the European travelers. But they were put there by the powerful because that somehow justified their dominance. Bringing forth this reality, emerging from my personal experience of going through the rigorous visa processes that question my decency as a human being at every step, confronts the privilege of the first world. Passport privilege remains an entirely unaddressed, conveniently overlooked inequality that defines every single immigration debate and crisis of movement. It is important to recognize these inequalities and their contribution to producing a world in which the 'high powers' are freer to move. The hierarchy is clearly laid out in 'Global Passport Rank' as common sense. 

So I hope the audience is uncomfortable knowing that behind the homogeneity of the international form of passport was the need to keep the 'undesirables' under surveillance. 

Do you miss in-person exhibitions or rather find new stimulus and motivation from the shift to digital exhibitions? How did you adapt your work to the online presentations over the last year?

In a way, the digital platform shatters the elitism surrounding traditional art spaces because it doesn't matter who you know and where you live; the audience is global. I graduated amidst the pandemic and was selected as a core member of an online residency straight after. The world paused, but creativity didn't, so I adapted and learned how to sculpt digitally. For this residency, SPUR world, I built a digital game for an artwork set within Parliament's Square in London. Combining the traditionality of sculpting and performance from my practice in the digital gave birth to a new medium. One that allowed for the audience to participate in time and space, compressed on their screens. 

But, what I'm cautious about when doing work for the screen is the flattening of the experience and the divide it creates between the digital haves. It has nots which is majorly guided - not by choice, but by economic inequality. 

Personally, there's something about displaying my work in a physical black cube that I enjoy, the void, a space where everything can become a dead-end except the artwork that's in there. I'm somehow sucking the audience in like it's a black hole. There's no escape, and they're forced to face reality. 

Do you have any upcoming shows or collaborations you are looking forward to? 

Yes, I'm showing at the Babylon Gallery in the United Kingdom this summer. I will be part of an online exhibition hosted by The Social Distanced Art Project in collaboration with Vane Gallery on Artsy. I'm working on a collaboration with a performance artist from India as part of an online residency that will be in an exhibition in 2022. I'm also supposed to visit Russia for a residency whenever it is safe to do so. 

I'm embarking on a self-taught journey as a curator as well, under the mentorship of an incredible curator, Helen Starr. We're working on a co-curated project which we're hoping to unveil soon. There's a lot to learn, but I'm excited. 

Finally, what are your plans for 2021 and the future in general? 

Working on digital projects and expanding my horizons in materiality has been the highlight of my post-graduation life, but I'm slowly seeking the need for tactility. I'm hoping to rent a studio and work on physical works in 2021 as the world slowly recovers from the pandemic. 

It's hard to keep the momentum going when the state of everything and everyone around me is crumbling, but I'm hoping to channel that energy towards a new piece of work inspired by the ruins we stand on today.