Listen. Your untangled threads reveal me from Raisa Kabir on Vimeo.
“Asking the viewer to look again, read the hidden text and listen to the silent language that sings” This is a quote from the poet Raman Mundair, and it explains the crux and concept of how my work relays ideas exploring invisible identities, the oxymoron, and codes of language.
Being invisible yet visible, the South Asian woman who is lesbian, bisexual, transgender or queer, is often an identity that is, silenced, hidden, and un believed. Yet as a racialized woman; her body is coded and certain fixed ideas about gender and assumed heterosexuality are projected onto that body, and a shade of visibility that is so often held onto raced bodies.
Where the language of ‘queer’ is read as implicitly White, it erases South Asian queerness in the process. This work is a process of revealing language, and reading queerness differently, in order to look beyond the surface by applying race to that identity.
That notion of what it is to be queer and what it is to be a South Asian woman, are seen to be identities that do not overlap. Where South Asian diasporic communities see LGBTQ identity as ‘other’ and as ‘western’ creating historic amnesia from the histories and culture before British colonialism. LBTQ women in India/South Asia do exist, and in the UK in the diaspora there are South Asian/Muslim queers and they are a part of our communities.
This is a piece of visual textile art, that incorporates themes around the experience and visibility of the self identified South Asian Queer woman.
How as a minority, is that existence erased and hidden from representation? How do we then navigate these invisible identities and challenge the expectations placed upon the identity of the South Asian woman, and the conforming ideals of gender, sexuality and morality?
By contrasting differences and encoding hidden patterns, then gradually revealing them within woven fabric – cloth becoming the metaphor - this work tackles in/visibility, being unrecognised, unacknowledged, unseen, and the violence that comes with being a South Asian queer woman. The duality, intersectionality, and corporeality of South Asian queer female identity.
Using the woven cloth to embed hidden motifs created out of letters from the Bengali alphabet, poetry is underwritten within the cloth. Thus employing a ‘loose thread’ embroidery technique (that emerges out of the extra weft figuring) which singles out specific letters within the cloth, enabling individual letters to be woven in with contrasting colours, and allowing the poetry to reveal itself within the cloth and subvert the conforming pattern.
A line of poetry translated into Bengali will be woven and hidden within the pattern of the cloth – “Lift the veil, and see our silenced language”
By encoding the fabric with hidden patterns of language that can only be read if you understand the code, it becomes an exercise in learning and reading queerness in relation to race, and the highlighting of differences and struggles in carving out a South Asian queer female identity.
This video documents the supporting work, drawings and woven piece as work in progress, as a showing at the RichMix gallery for International women's week in March 2013.
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