Sarindar Dhaliwal, installation view, curtains for babel, x, y & z, 2003, mixed-media installation. Collection of the artist. Credit: Courtesy of the John Hansard Gallery, UK
Exhibitions
Sarindar Dhaliwal: Record Keeping
The Davies Foundation and Contemporary Feature Galleries
25 September - 18 December 2005
Record Keeping presents large-format works on paper and installations spanning 15 years (1988-2003) of Sarindar Dhaliwal's visual art practice. Dhaliwal's works offer layered accounts of events past and imagined, collapsing time and space in an allusive zone of wry association. The artist draws upon a personal history of movement from her birthplace in India, to Britain and then Canada, a circuit retraced in adult life and enriched in recent years by a series of international artists' residencies. Many Kingstonians will recall Dhaliwal's years in this community, an interlude poignantly registered in the work Triple Self-Portrait with Persimmons and Pomegranates.
Dhaliwal embeds passages of text in the densely coloured, fragmented fields of her work such that each piece renders an account or acts as a narrative prompt, ranging from diaristic autobiography and folk tales to gossip and news reports. She plumbs the nature of language in Dutch/English Lessons for Donald Evans and Me, Punjabi Sheets #2: Family Matters, and curtains for babel, x, y & z. By staging the effort to learn and to remember language, the works highlight the way words shape experience and our relationships with others. The listing of dead and endangered languages in curtains... records the steady diminution of linguistic diversity around the globe.
Sarindar Dhaliwal: Record Keeping is jointly curated and organised by Art Centre Curator of Contemporary Art Jan Allen, and Sunil Gupta, of OVA The Organisation for Visual Arts, London, UK. The exhibition completed a three-venue tour in Britain in the spring, and will tour in Canada through 2006. A handsome 48-page illustrated catalogue with essays by Janice Cheddie and Richard Fung accompanies the show. This exhibition and catalogue are made possible by the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Arts Council (England), and John Hansard Gallery.
Jan Allen