Audio Collage
2020 - Film: 03:38 - Sajil Kaleem
Sajil is a painter who experiments with various physical media, particularly clay and film. Migration and cultural understanding feature heavily in her work, as an attempt to understand the intricacies of cultural displacement and the significance of heritage. Sajil often draws from photographic sources that are a documentation of life, and draws on significant points of interest in order to frame them in ways that are relevant within her physical constructions.
Contemplating ideas surrounding nostalgia and familial impact is key to shaping the meaning behind her work, and the various processes of execution become equally relevant to understanding the ways in which the thoughts came to fruition.
https://sajilkaleem.wixsite.com/website
‘Audio Collage’
Text by Amy Jowett
Sajil Kaleem's visual language explores a personal approach to a sense of displacement and dysphoria. Identity and the questioning of such comes out of the work through a subtly built-up understanding of cultural context and contradiction, that not only forms the work, but imprints the identity of artist into the work itself. This creates a simultaneous feeling of both the personal and the many, through the exclusion of the physical body, or distance to the body, in many works by Sajil.
The moving image and audio project ‘Audio Collage’ addresses these themes that run through Sajil's work. Starting with sound, the work draws on voices of the artist’s friends and family. Sajil uses leading questions formed around cultural identity and the relationship it has to displacement that the artist personally experiences, having moved home and country frequently throughout her childhood and adolescence. These pointed questions like ‘where is home?’ are deliberately ambiguous in order to target people in the artist’s life, so that they become aware of having similar experiences to her own. This collectivisation of voices and answers envelopes the artists voice in the work, creating an orchestrated and selected community around Sajil, who’s voice works as the grounding perspective and representation of the artist. This active collecting and selecting of similar voices and experiences creates a fostered community, making the artist feel less alone in this sense of dysphoria and isolation that arise from her lived experiences.
This sense of comfort and support offered by the adopted family of the artist is created through this surrounding of not only the artist and her voice, but though the encompassing of the viewer also. The panning of the sound when on dual speakers or headphones creates a sound-scape of sorts. With the artist collecting these recordings both in person and over digital platforms, an understanding of the distance of the people being interviewed is made apparent to the viewer through the varied qualities of the recordings, again creating this sense of the gathering of shared view points, deliberately excluding voices that have not felt this displacement. This creates a safe space both for the artist to represent shared experiences of displacement, and for the viewer to explore this complex, nuanced relationship with place, culture and time within the work.
Building is a key theme of Sajil’s work in both physical and non-physical ways: connections with other people are explored in ‘Audio Collage’ by mimicking the physical construction of a miniature home. This use of the miniature creates a sense of memory and sentimentality, resembling a dollhouse or space where actions can be played out. Rather than orchestrating a scene with the miniature as its central focus, Sajil presents it as a hollow shell, embedding meaning upon it by scratching into the building syned in time with the voices, who explain and reiterate their relationships to ‘home’. The shell and ambiguous nature of the building again creates a symbol of the Home that can relate to the many, without becoming tied to a specific location. This representation of home encompasses not only the artists depiction, but ours as the viewer alongside the people who were interviewed for this project.
While a feeling of ambiguity is clear within the clay building’s architecture, Sajil uses colour in the clay to reference her own heritage. She uses a rich terracotta clay, which is reminiscent of that found in the artist’s birthplace of Pakistan. Sajil opens up a starting point to a discussion about home and her identity, creating the sense that although some things are fixed (such as birthplace), accepting one’s culture comes after, demonstrated through the engraving of bricks into the blank clay walls. She addresses that instead of identity, the home and the self being just one thing (in this case Pakistani), there are a multiplicity of interpretations possible. The act of engraving also pays homage to the artist’s Grandfather who was a builder himself, and who they saw in working throughout her early childhood years. The process captured in this film is almost playing house as a child would, copying what family members would do around the house and wanting to do the jobs of family members. The artist pays respect to the roots of her ever growing and changing identity, to the culture they grew up within, and to the lasting influence of her family and heritage.
The visuals of the film are slow and repetive, focusing on the laborious process of building where only the artist’s hands change within the shot. This concentration on motion is deliberate, as Sajil again can represent the process of forming one’s identity and coming to understand where home is. Importantly, Sajil’s refusal to be seen within the frame as a identifiable person opens up this discussion to the viewer, enabling them to put themselves inside of the artist’s perspective, as though they are the ones sat at the desk building this work. Sajil retains gestures to herself and her own identity within the work however, through wearing identifying objects such as her rings. This sentimentality and act of collecting jewellery ecchos the collecting of objects and sotries from people in her life: keeping them close and associating those relationships with what the artist calls home.
Sajil presents topics of identity, culture, belonging, memory, autonomy and the home in a frank and honest way, by recording and presenting a sculptural process alongside collective discussions. Sajil’s work is without trickery: it’s honest, documentary-like, condensed and appears somewhat 2D, almost like a photograph - as the artist says herself: ‘memory is also 2D’.
Read Sajil’s essay on Amy Jowett’s work HERE.
