Artists on the border claim the edge as centre

Toni Morrisson said: “I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. I claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.”

When thinking about the work of Alka Dass and Tyra Naidoo — two Cape Town-based artists, originally from Durban — this quote comes to mind. Both artists disturb the idea of India as motherland for South Africans of Indian ancestry through their art.

The artists form part of the SA Kutti Collective, and their work encompasses some of the duality inherent in the word “Kutti” itself — in Punjabi and Hindi, it is a slang word that means “bitch”, and in Malayalam, it refers to “darling”.

Considering SA artists of Indian origin in the larger pantheon of blackness and black artists in SA is tricky business. Indian SA artists are beholden to their work being viewed as ancillary, or on the margins. This is due to being a minority in SA; cultural norms that discourage making art one’s career in favour of more stable employment, and our enmeshed histories being footnotes in the grander narratives of oppression, freedom and art-making in SA.

Dass, whose current solo exhibition The Blue House is on at Cape Town’s Whatiftheworld gallery, delves further into some of these themes.

“I grew up like most SA humans in their 30s, in a multiracial school. And I remember being told that ‘I wasn’t really truly South African because I was Indian’,” says Dass.

While travelling to India, she was faced with the same rhetoric — you aren’t Indian, either. This isn’t an unusual feeling for Indian South Africans — on my grandparents’ trip to India in the 1960s, they were told they were black because they are dark-skinned and from Africa. Their caste position, like Dass’ and most Indian South Africans from indentured diasporas, is also obscured through history, time and assimilation in SA, which adds to the sense of exclusion or dislocation felt in the supposed homeland.

Expansive works

Before this exhibition, Dass’ contributions formed part of Church Project’s Cape Town Art Fair booth, centred on “Black Imagination”, a reminder to understand Indian South Africans as part of the larger movement to value, support and amplify black artists and imagination. This can deepen our understandings of blackness to be as expansive as the Kala Pani — a term used by indentured diasporas in reference to the “black waters” of the Indian Ocean.

Naidoo’s henna-based works are expansive and tap into the surreal. There are subtle nods to and subversions of Hindu deities and Indian Miniature art as seen in Indian SA homes, such as the human-animal hybrid figures and the reference to the weird and sensual in religious tomes such as the Bhagavad Gita and Thirukkural, as seen in her works Untitled IX and Who Knows.

Growing up, Naidoo would see a typical small, framed Xerox-printed image of an overly pious deity or Indian saint in an auntie’s house.

“The look towards India as the homeland is something I wanted to confront. Especially because the miniature paintings that are glorified here in SA, are extremely religiously conservative,” she says.

Through poking fun at the romanticised conservatism in celebrated Indian miniature paintings, Naidoo takes it further by creating through henna — a material used to protect, celebrate and invoke the sacred through its application.

Alchemy occurs

If Naidoo plays with ideas of what is sacred, finding a new kind of funhouse mirror for Indian miniatures, then Dass reifies her lineage to the realm of both haunted and haunting — spectres without beginning or end. Both artists fuse their work with a sense of sacredness, ritual and materiality, whether through Naidoo’s meticulous henna and resin applications, or through the time-intensive process of cyanotyping, weaving and beading that Dass shows through her work.

“Applying the cyanotype solution, there is a sort of alchemy that occurs from the dark room to the sunlight and the image that emerges. My grandmother used to joke that it was not entirely up to me how the figures of the family members turned out — that it was completely up to them whether they wanted to be seen or not,” says Dass of the process.

The images in Dass’ work weave in and out of each other while conjuring nostalgia for a fictive past. Alka’s family photo album resembles my own. Indian South Africans share similar histories of migration. The first generation of Dass’ family were of indentured stock, and subsequent family members descended from trader, or passenger Indian journeys, working in the burgeoning textile industry in colonial Natal.

The SA art world in 2024 is a different place than it was in 2019, when the Kutti Collective formed as a balm to the exclusions we faced then. But as Naidoo says, engagement with her work by gallerists, curators, writers and art-going audiences treads a fine line between being seen as a person or as a cultural commodity. Dass believes similarly, saying that though there might always be a sense of fetishisation in the arts industry, she’s learning that her work can be important without a connection to something explicitly political.

Alka Dass’ solo exhibition, The Blue House, is at Whatiftheworld Gallery, Cape Town, until April 27.