This video is a collaboration between Anna Laine and the diaspora artists Reginald S. Aloysius, Hari Rajaledchumy, Anushiya Sundaralingam, Sabes Sugunasabesan and Arunthathi Ratnaraj. It conveys how the artists investigate their Tamil Sri Lankan background and current plural belonging through their art practice, how their working processes of dialectic movements between accommodating themselves and creating disruptions take individual as well as shared forms. The complexity of the artists’ positions has been explored by means of direct improvisations and constructed settings in London, Belfast and Jaffna, over an eighteen-months’ period. They way the artists presently reconnect with fragmented memories, displaced skills, lost objects and confused feelings becomes a means to reimagine both the archive and possible futures.
Video
All rights reserved, Anna Laine
[Bio c. 2014] Anna Laine is an interdisciplinary researcher with a PhD in social anthropology from Gothenburg University and current funding within the field of artistic research. Trained in both academic and artistic practices, she investigates overlapping interests and forms of knowledge production between the two fields, and her present project is focused on migration as experienced within the Tamil diaspora in the UK. Laine is employed at Stockholm University and the Museum of Ethnography, and has been a visiting research fellow at Goldsmiths, UoL.
The Bureau of Memories: Archives and Ephemera is a thematic reflection on the archive and its discontents. Washington’s identity as the seat of American political power is amplified through its role as the locus of its own memorialization. Where there is history, there is haunting. By drawing on the archive’s unnerving, uncanny, and ephemeral specters, this exhibition is an effort to re-imagine and reposition archives as sites which not only have the capacity to produce and contest historical memory, but also generate significant gaps and blind spots.