Looking to Taaluq
Exhibition dates: Wed 13 to Sat 30 May 2009
View the artworks
Taaluq is an urdu word for a connection between humans…one that can lead to a relationship or further contact.
My head is between worlds; worlds that are labeled ‘first’, or ‘third’. Worlds to which one holds a passport but does not really belong, and beyond that the historical world that constructs my own and others realities. It is a strangely cultureless, casteless, sometimes privileged, and placeless space.
I became interested in Australia’s historical links to the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent while studying colonization. I always wondered to what extent was the creation of colonies such as Australia linked to British control of India. As I study I do a lot of observation and visual documentation. Having a foot in different worlds imparts an experience of this region that is visceral, complex and sometimes confronting. Walking down the street in Baroda or Lahore, I make drawings as I go and it is a mixed experience. The supermarket and cowpat economies mingle in extreme economic disparity. Legacies of British imperialism are very apparent in the way many people talk and behave. It all washes over me as I work.
There is something about feeling an outsider that gives me the urge to insert myself into different societies. In India, the state of Gujarat has a fundamentalist government, BJP that enforces a conservative Hindu morality. In the last year life drawing classes and entire fine arts departments have been shut down for permitting students to make divergent portrayals of Hindu deities. In this somewhat charged atmosphere, my work has become more archetypal, codified and smaller in scale.
Time spent in Pakistan has changed my work. Conversations with people about the legacy of Ali Jinnah and Lord Mountbatten fed my caricatures of Jinnah, Queen Victoria and George Bush Junior. Tragic stories like that of student Nida Bangesh found their way into miniature portraits. During power cuts I worked on Lahore Series in the teashops of Lahore – warm, hospital places with generators for light, and captive tea drinkers to sketch.
As an artist I find the lines blurring between Taliban, the BJP, the British Raj and the US. My Australian passport gives me an ability to cross from India into Pakistan that is rarely given to ordinary people whose families lie on each side. Using symbols referenced from historic artworks and exploring the aesthetic of Miniature painting I have tried to visually contextualize implausible and yet palpable links between the worlds I perceive. I frequently brought out these images that have travelled from Baroda to Lahore, showed them to people; on the street, at the border, in teashops, tents and offices as if they were anecdotes or specimens of a personal and eccentric nature.
The peripatetic experience makes me think of ancient storytellers who traversed Australia and the Subcontinent, reinterpreting the news and making connections. I hope that if I am doing something similar, I am also looking to taaluq.
Michal Glikson is presently studying her masters in painting at the Baroda School, the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Gujarat.
In 2008 she was invited to be artist in resident at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, where she gave a presentation of students work from the Baroda School and showed the Baroda series. The Lahore series evolved out of her internship in NCA’s specialized Miniature painting department and has been shown in Baroda in tandem with a presentation of students work from the NCA, Lahore.