Priyageetha Dia’s animation, we.remain.in.multiple.motions_Malaya, conjures a collective voice of the labourers into a poem that foregrounds the experience of sea travel and labour in the estates. The narration added to the video is constructed around a shared vocabulary across Tamil and Malay languages. The bilingual glossary permeates through the poem, minimising the default monopoly of the English language and its capacity to homogenise voices and experiences. In counterpoint to Gilman’s colonial account that reduced human lives to the mercantile speech of “supplies,” “insufficient quantity,” “defective quality,” “heavy cost of importation”, Dia infuses her writing with the scents of camphor, sesame oil, and sandalwood. The rhythmic patterns given by bodily sounds, breathing and the pulse are amplified by the musician Tesla Manaf’s percussion work. The artist’s poetic tone renders contextual specificity, sensorial imagery, and linguistic texture to the experience of sea-crossing and work in the plantations. This hybrid idiom alludes to a postcolonial literary tradition that embraces complex experiences of displacement and belonging.

“In our tongues, we’re at the fertile frontier of codes, to hear a word among the exchanges of masters and slaves. Is this why my true mother tongue is poetry?” asked rhetorically the poet Khal Torabully.” It is perhaps poetry’s ability to reach life to its core with an economy of means that compels Torabully. But it might also be poetry’s capacity to deploy, in his words, “baroquism”, an aesthetic strategy that embraces opacity and resists mono-semantic constructions of language and identities. Baroquism stands true to historical events that connected “diverse mental structures, modes of life, languages and visions of the world." In a similar manner, interweaving language and imagery rich in texture, Dia’s animation embodies a touch of baroquism.

Echoing previous works by the artist (Blood Sun, 2022; Long Live the New Fle$h, 2020), the animation created for this exhibition features a single-computer generated protagonist with female bodily attributes. While computer-generated imagery (CGI) is often deployed in mass entertainment for naturalistic depictions of characters and believable performances, Dia’s protagonist never fully feels or aspires to be real. As viewers, we are constantly brought to acknowledge the protagonist’s discernable materiality. Whether gently touching the water, caressing the land or fur, and sensing the marks of incision on a rubber tree, the protagonist evokes, in the words of cultural theorist Laura U. Marks, an experience of haptic visuality.Marks defines this form of perception as a tactile mode of looking, a way in which the eyes use the organs of touch. The sense of haptic in the artist’s animation is amplified by her relinquishment of a linear perspective and resistance to depth vision to which Western’s modern traditions of representation are tied. Besides, the interactions between her protagonist and the environment enhance the haptic sensibility in the artist’s work. Transferring the ritual drawing of kolam, which traditionally marks the thresholds of homes or the margins of the streets onto the body, Dia continuously strives to dissolve the boundaries between body and environment. This spatial merging is amplified in the architecture of the exhibition where enlarged hands on the wall guide, embrace, or entrap the viewers inside.

Read the full text, Forget Me, Forget Me Not by Anca Rujoiu