1.Dissertation
Overview:
My dissertation titled ‘Navigating the African-Indian Ocean as a site of re- worlding in South Africa’s post-1994 era’ has been published by the Ameena Gafoor Institite for the Study of Indenture and its Legacies, under the new and emerging research section.
Here’s an overview:
This dissertation was written in Summer 2022 for my MA Art and Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London. Drawing on my own history, I look at the differences in migration within the group racialised as 'Indian' under apartheid in South Africa. Mapping some of the tensions present in the neo-apartheid era, such as xenophobia, anti-blackness and the July 2021 riots, I break down the history and afterlives of migration across class. I conclude, more imaginatively, that the ocean (or the African-Indian Ocean) holds counter-colonial ideals for a world defined by hybridity, fluidity, borderlessness and multiculturalism.
The works above draw on walking as a social practice. They
look at the layered nature of history in a space called Fordsburg in
Johannesburg, South Africa, where the past, present and speculative future are
collapsed. This space holds a history of forced removals during the Group Areas
Act during apartheid, but now have become a multicultural space where people all
over Africa, the Middle East, India and Pakistan migrate to. This place has become a cultural microcosm containing many worlds
brought to Johannesburg. It is layered in many ways, and I found myself paying
attention to the space and its construction, its landscape and architecture
that was informed by its histories, the layered nature of a landscape where
these histories are present and very much alive. I believe that these
landscapes reveal the rupture in time.
I used to walk in the space almost every day, where walking
became a sort of practice to clear my mind. I found myself paying attention to
the smells, sounds, being overstimulated by the visuals and migrant stalls
which have a very characteristic way of being. I wrote poems alongside these
collages, so they should be read together and they can be accessed in the
publication.