Raisa Kabir

'House Made of Tin' (a socially distanced weaving performance) 2020 Ford Foundation Gallery NYC

 

 

 

 

Indisposable: Structures of Support After the ADA Chapter 4: Raisa Kabir: House Made of Tin (a socially distanced weaving performance)

Raisa Kabir critically examines how global structures of production create a hierarchy in which value and care are assigned to laborers that can adhere to eugenic and capitalist expectations of “useful” and “functioning” bodies. Kabir uses textile production in their work to alternately cite these structures and reclaims their output as allegory for, in Kabir’s words, “the ways in which marginalized communities rely – and have always relied – on support networks of care and structures of mutual aid to survive that are separate to the state.” In their woven sculptures, the intertwined threads of weaving signify the interdependent care on which disability depends. These interrelationships, made visible, perform a disability aesthetic that resists commodification and individuation. Through an open call, Kabir organized and documented a public weaving performance in October 2020 created, by, for, and from BIPOC, disabled, and queer participants. The result was a geometric textile sculpture created through interdependent action and care. Kabir used the documentation from the performance to create this new film, House Made of Tin (A Socially Distanced Weaving Performance). The visible face masks and physical distance between participants underscores the urgency and precarious nature of support structures during a time of pandemic. By embodying these structures of support and mutual aid, this performance asks us to consider how labor and care are connected across all bodies and borders. In doing so, House Made of Tin (A Socially Distanced Weaving Performance) underscores a key precept of disability justice that, in Kabir’s words, “is dependent on wider society believing in, and participating in, creating access for all.” The screening will be followed by a conversation with artists melannie monoceros and Raju Rage to discuss crafting resilience, trans care, crip kinship and chronic illness.   LINK TO EVENT   Date And Time Fri, April 30, 2021 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM BST

 

Photo credits- Marlo Mortimer, and Raisa Kabir

Audio of Raju Rage, Raisa Kabir and Nirmal Puwar at Stuart Hall Library

 

 

 

Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group meeting in February featured a collaboration between two young artists, Raisa Kabir and Raju Rage. They described how they use their art and textile practices to address gendered South Asian queer identity and the meanings of cotton cloth on the brown queer body. Raisa Kabir brought along examples of her woven textiles and Raju Rage dressed in a sari printed with archival photographs.

The artists worked together on the project "There is More at Stake Than Just 3 Metres of Cloth" which represents the migrations of South Asians from North India/ Panjab to East Africa to Britain and the symbolism encoded within the turban. Sociologist Nirmal Puwar offered her thoughts and questions followed by comments from the intrigued audience. 

Read more about the participants on the webpage and an audio recording of the event is available below.

 

 

 

http://stuarthalllibrary.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/audio-recordings-of-raju-rage-and-raisa.html

“Your threads cut my fingers, they bleed yet again and again”

 

“Your threads cut my fingers, they bleed yet again and again”

A part live “woven” art piece, that re-invokes the histories and threads of violence encoded within cotton cloth production, and the resistance of the queer brown body. Focusing on the performance of racialised labour, migration of textile workers, and the Bengali Diaspora, the work re links the geographies of Oldham in Lancsashire and Dhaka, Bangladesh; two historic towns that were built on the production of cotton cloth.

Dhaka witnessed the colonisation of India by the British from the 18th Century, and the co-opting of the skilled weavers there to export cotton to England, known to produce the finest muslin cottons available.

This link is later re-routed when immigrants, who left Bangladesh during the 1971 war, arrive in the UK and ended up working in the Textile factories in the North of England, in mill towns in Lancashire like Oldham, who once during the height of the industrial revolution, proudly out produced and undercut the hand weavers of Bangladesh and India. When Bengal was divided during the partition, people used cotton cloth as signs of nationalism, and resistance to Bangladesh being torn apart.

The work uses reclaimed spools from disused Lancashire factories, and unravels the spools of thread, which have been spun from cotton in South Asia, to create a woven installation using parts of a hand loom. The work is a retracing of the repeated use of racialised labour and it’s connection to cotton cloth, and hinting at the violence that permeates this innocuous looking material. Taking a look at the how cloth is inextricably linked to resistance, the brown body, colonialism and capitalism, and how the effects are still dictating working people’s lives today.

   

Performance took place at INIVA gallery as part of their Contemporary Rites Live Art programme of Emerging practices. Photos courtesy of Christa Holka.

  

  

  

  

 

  

 

 Photos by Christa Holka

 

The Politics of Cloth on South Asian Queer and Trans bodies. A collaboration between Raju Rage and Raisa Kabir

"There is More at Stake Than Just 3 metres of Cloth."

 

Communicating the transitions and migrations of turbans from North India/ Panjab via East Africa to Britain, Raisa Kabir weaving on a loom, crafting cloth conceptually created by Raju Rage, who ‘performed’ embodying this cloth, with their complex migration narratives, on their non-conforming queer-transgender body.

(weaving loom, projection, images, text, sculptural objects, soundscape, cloth)

Link to Raju Rage's artist site here, to see more of their work

 

Some details of the turban being woven...

In/Visible Space: Dress, space and the racialised queer body

  

 

 

 

A selection of the series "In/Visible Space." A series of visual essays that explore the interwoven links between dress and space, as components in the construction and visibility of South Asian LBTQ identity. Questioning how gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity affect how queer presenting brown bodies are read and perceived in context to public/private space in contrast to their own gaze. The montages have been shown in London and Amsterdam. http://www.in-visiblespace.co.uk/

VISIBLE SPACE: REFLECTIONS ON THE REALM OF DIMENSIONAL AFFECT, SPACE AND THE QUEER RACIALISED SELF

 

The private view is on the 15th April and th exhibition opens the day after 16th April. More info at http://www.in-visiblespace.co.uk/ and the listing on the Richmix website is here

Space

Installation for degree show exhibition.

"This work examines invisible identities, those that specifically cross over race, gender and sexuality.

Being invisible yet visible; the South Asian woman who identifies as 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 gendered, and assumed heterosexuality projected onto that body. Where the language of 'queer' is read implicitly as White, its construction erases South Asian queer women.

The crux of this work is a process of revealing language, deciphering codes of difference, and (re)reading queerness differently as an identity which has race applied to it. Through collating interviews and portraits of women's stories, and weaving them into Bengali poetry hidden within the cloth; it seeks to throw light onto the (in)visibility of South Asian queer women.

 

The patterns are inverted characters from the Bengali alphabet, which conceal the poetry that underwrites the cloth. Asking the viewer to reexamine what it is they are looking at, and the unknown voices it contains. We do not all speak the same language; it is in acknowledging differences that we are able to see others.

 

A sound piece accompanies the work where you can listen to the piece of poetry. The poem which wouldn’t be the same if translated, speaks of challenging our perception of racialized queer identity, by listening to the silent voices, hearing the invisible stories, and by setting light to blackness we can see reflected, the blinding whiteness that masks our unspoken shadows."

visible/invisibility

"Lift the veil and see our silent language"

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.

 

 

South Asian Queer photography project – exploring realm and location of private/public space, and the queer act of looking.

 

 

(Fire 1996 dir Deepa Mehta)

South Asian Queer photography project – exploring realm and location of private/public space, and the queer act of looking at oneself/reflections

 

OBJECTIVE

Recreating/reflecting South Asian Queer space, using photography to instill a sense of invisibility/visibility, charade, and performance. KEY WORDS: The voyeur, the subject, and the gaze.

 

NARRATIVE

It can be argued that the South Asian queer person is only read as queer, in relation to the space they are in, or who they are with. In hetero/public space, layers of sexuality, and codes of queerness can be lost, or erased, and it is in often only in queer space that the narrative of queer ID can be confirmed.

 

Often it is private space, or the construction of self made spaces, that queer persons build around themselves, that they are the most safe and therefore most visible. It is in this space, created to look at oneself, see oneself and read oneself, which I wish to explore and present as an antidote to seeing oneself reflected in (white) constructed, hetero public space. As well as, questioning the subtle shifts of public space and private space, and how the South Asian queer ID person moves through these retrospectively.

 

In this scene from Fire 1996 (shown above) the character Sita is able to only see herself in the image she wants to create, when she is safely within the parameters of her private space. She is able to look at herself in the mirror, see her queerness and affirm it without any relation to how others see her, or place her. The crucial moment, is when Sita is engaged with her own image, watching herself dance in the mirror, in a private moment wearing men’s clothes and seeing herself as something more than how others categorize her.

 

“Though it is precisely when Sita puts on the male clothing that she transforms herself, by herself, enabling her to be the agent of her own desire, and in this case, queer desire. The power of queering Sita’s brown female body, with men’s clothing effectively eradicates that she is the assumed heterosexual, passive South Asian woman that fits into her gendered role, but it does not erase her South Asian identity either. This scene of ‘disobedient dressing’ permits Sita to belong in the South Asian space, yet the jeans on her body create a space where she can be queer as well as being South Asian. The two identities do not have to be mutually exclusive; she is able to be both these identities here at once.” (Kabir. R, 2013) 

 

These first sets of images can provide a catalyst, in which to examine South Asian queer personal space. Constructed in private moments, yet subverting the gaze of the voyeur, and still retaining control of how South Asian queer persons are allowing themselves to be read, or seen within that space. Inviting the viewer to look, without them knowing what they are seeing. In order to play with the gaze of the onlooker and ultimately the self, we can show all or only parts of one self, the suggestion of a body, or reflections of that gaze in a mirror, very abstract images that hint at the possibility of what is about to be seen. It is here then, that we are confronted with the image and gaze of the subject instead, looking at themselves. A narrative of reflecting the private space on to the public space; subverting the outsiders lens with the subjects own examination of themselves, I argue is a queer act of looking.

 

CONTEXT

This series should have a strong connection between, the subject, their own narrative and story, and reflection on what that means to them. A range of photo stories that explore the charade, and mirage of queer performance, and the struggle for visibility as South Asian lesbian, bisexual, trans or queer women, genderqueer persons; without facets of their identity being erased in the raced (hetero) public sphere and misinterpreted desire. 

 

QUESTIONS: 

 

Where would/do you feel the most safe to be South Asian and LBTQ?

 

 

Can you describe that place? Is it tangible; a physical place or object, or a person, or only a sense of location?

 

 

If you imagine yourself in your private space, public space or queer space? Do you notice the difference - where is it easier to move through? What location?

 

When you look in the mirror, what do you see?