On Belonging
The Wall Within
Contained I
Collagraphs on cast plaster and fabric
Reaching through 5 ½ yards | Reaching Across 8497 miles
Collaboration with Lois Bielefeld
Fifty Archival pigment prints (44x60”)
Raja moved to the United States 28 years ago while Bielefeld is a Milwaukee native. Recent political events of the Trump era have given voice to xenophobia and racism compelling the two artists to examine how initial perception of the ‘other’ occurs. People innately categorize and stereotype. Garments play a large role in the recognition of identity. Raja has amassed over 150 saris as they are an integral part of her culture, but living in Milwaukee she rarely wears them due to both internalized social pressures and practicality. She is now wearing the sari as an act of resistance against conformity and reclaiming the right to look different and yet belong. While wearing one of her barely used saris, she traverses Milwaukee’s urban landscape as Bielefeld documents her movement. They have photographed in both mundane and landmark locations and also at quintessential Milwaukee events such as the Wisconsin State Fair. Part social experiment and part performance, the work has become a statement of occupying space in a town where Raja has only felt superficially at home. This body of work brings together Bielefeld’s innate understanding of the Midwest with Raja’s efforts to understand the city.
What is Recorded | What is Remembered (2018)
Collaborative projects by Lois Bielefeld and Nirmal Raja
In response to increasing racial polarity in the United States, Nirmal Raja and Lois Bielefeld have launched two collaborative projects exploring identity, place, and belonging. While one project examines the role of costume and our visual understanding of race, the other questions the veracity of recorded history and our attempts to contend with it.
· 10 Still Photographs (50x37.5”)
· 3 channel video installation (13 minutes, 45 seconds) (on-view soon)
· 1 Video Performance (5 minutes, 30 seconds)
What is recorded | What is remembered responds to an engraved timeline of Wisconsin and America’s history on Milwaukee’s river-walk. Raja made a rubbing of sections of this timeline on 30 yards of fabric with the intent to explore how she fits into American history. The fabric then became a prop for ten performance-based photographs and two separate 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. In the three-channel video work the fabric and ritual actions are performed by 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 and stand in for marginalized communities and pay homage to their crucial role in this nation’s story. These three works address the slippage of time, inter-connectedness, and the burden of responsibility.
Vergence: An Orientalist Dystopia (2016)
(Photo credit: Robb Quinn and Kevin Miyazaki)
Site Specific Installation at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum in Milwaukee, WI
In this era of “post-truth” we are now given license to choose what we believe and disbelieve. Truth is now relative, and we are compelled to exist in multifaceted alternate realities. If this is the case, can we examine the archive with the same dystopic lens?
Raja has spent the last few months delving into various materials at the UWM libraries with a focus on orientalist representations of South Asia. In this installation she brings together a selection of materials from the Special Collections and The American Geographical Society libraries and ephemera from her own personal collection, in an interactive and exploratory installation.
She investigates how early perceptions of South Asia formed and urges the viewers to form their own connections to the present. Most often, the West has seen Asia as either exotic and beautiful or dangerous and perverse. These perceptions continue to inform our present day understanding of this region and people. Raja gives the audience an opportunity to approach these materials with fresh eyes, reframed by the screen that surrounds the sleeping porch.
The “Jaali” or decorative screen has long been used as a device for segregating genders and spaces in South Asian culture. Using this structure as a trope, she surrounds the viewer with a deceptively decorative screen inscribed with a listing of ongoing hate crimes against South Asian Americans sourced from the South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) website. She asks the viewers to exercise “vergence”- an ophthalmic term that refers to the focus and alignment of eye movements. The viewers have the choice to focus on this list or look through the screen towards the blue lake and ignore the violence that is happening around them. By giving the audience agency to make their own connections and come to their own conclusions, Raja hopes to bring attention to how our perceptions of the “other” have been mediated historically and how we make choices that unconsciously or consciously reflect bias and apathy.
This work would not have been possible without the help and generosity of several people in the community:
Marcy Bidney at the American Geographical Society Library at UWM
Max Yela at the Special Collections Library at UWM
Ann Hanlon, Ling Meng and Jie Chen at Digital Collections, UWM
Sase Eisenmann and Ben Demborwski at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design
Staff and volunteers at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum
Entangled (2015)
Immigrant narratives, particularly that of women, are complex and rich. They are often interwoven with themes of family relationships, motherhood, domesticity, work and home. The prescribed roles of women in the their native culture usually get discarded, modified and edited in their new home. This narrative of change is rich with excitement and beauty, but also heartbreak and struggle. I used collected silk saris from Indian-American women to make this soft sculpture that expresses this complexity. Standing in for bodies, the tangle of sari strands speak to the complex richness of experiences by 6 Indian American women. The work is partnered with a 5.1 sound installation of edited audio from a directed conversation between these women while they share stories of first experiences in America, motherhood, loss, aging and the location of home.
