On Belonging

"What is recorded | What is remembered" is the collaborative work of Nirmal Raja and Lois Bielefeld. The 3-channel video piece responds to an engraved timeline of Wisconsin and America’s history on Milwaukee’s riverwalk. Raja made a rubbing of sections of this timeline on 30 yards of organdy fabric. This fabric became a prop for performance based photo and video works that bring attention to our fraught relationship to history. With an implicit understanding that history is written by victors (usually male) and with plenty of gaps and errors, they choreographed sequences that evoke our conflicted relationship with history. With the fabric and ritual actions performed by these nineteen women, history is visualized as a membrane that connects, divides, filters and binds. They made a deliberate choice to give prominence to women from diverse backgrounds that stand in for often-marginalized communities and pay homage to their crucial role in this nation’s story. This 3 channel video installation addresses the slippage of time, inter-connectedness and the burden of responsibility.