Forget Me, Forget Me Not

In Forget Me, Forget Me Not, Priyageetha Dia pursues a mindful encounter mediated by technology with colonial representations of labouring bodies. How does one attend to difficult imagery — visual and textual — that continues to dispossess colonial subjects of dignity and agency? Amid the sea of information and data prone to racialized terminology, what are the possibilities for an artistic engagement to eschew or hijack the perpetuation of violence? While the exhibition title calls to question what to remember and forget, it is concerned in equal manner with how to do it. Forget Me, Forget Me Not is a plea for new forms and ethics of remembrance by an artist whose use of technology consciously dismisses its claims to neutrality and immateriality.

The booklet “Labor in British Malaya” published in 1923 and authored by E. W. F. Gilman became Dia’s pivotal archival reference in the thinking process of this exhibition.¹ The brochure provides an overview of the establishment and development of the Indian immigration fund administered by Gilman himself. Issued at a time when Malaya became the world's largest exporter of rubber, this pamphlet outlines the process that undergirded the large migration of workforce from the port of Madras (present-day Chennai) to different parts of Malaya.² Gilman’s account includes one appendix that was supposedly addressed to the workers. In a promotional manner, this handout provides a range of information from the climate in Malaya to wages, working hours, health and education facilities— all those terms and conditions that controlled workers’ lives.³ Gilman ends the brochure admitting lightly that the text overall reflects “the standpoint of the employer rather than of the laborer.”⁴ But where can one encounter the standpoint of the laborer? The laborer whose “unskilled” skills of tapping and weeding made Malaya the most profitable colony in the British Empire and the rubber plantations its largest moneymaking enterprise?⁵ Confronted with the blatant rhetorical performance of decent conditions of work in the description of what was otherwise an exploitative industry and the absence of laborers’ voices, the artist seeks throughout the exhibition the possibility of a counter-narrative.

Dia's animation (we.remain.in.multiple.motions_Malaya) conjures the collective voice of the laborers into a poem that foregrounds the experience of sea travel and labor in the estates. This body of writing is constructed around a shared vocabulary across Tamil and Malay languages. A bilingual glossary permeates through the poem minimizing the default monopoly of the English language and its capacity to homogenize voices and experiences.

The rhythmic pattern given by bodily sounds, breathing and heart beating is amplified by the musician Tesla Manaf's percussion work. The artist's poetic tone gives contextual specificity, sensorial imagery, and linguistic texture to the experience of sea-crossing and work in the plantations. The hybrid idiom of the narrating voice alludes to a postcolonial literary tradition that embraces complex experiences of displacement and belonging. "In our tongues, we're at the fertile frontier of codes, to hear a word among the exchanges of masters and slaves. Is this why my true mother tongue is poetry?" asks the poet Khal Torabully.⁷ It is perhaps poetry's ability to reach life to its core with an economy of means that compels Torabully. But it might be also poetry's capacity to deploy, in his words, "baroquism", an aesthetic strategy that embraces opacity and resists mono-semantic construction of language and identities. Baroquism stands true to historical events that brought into contact "diverse mental structures, modes of life, languages and visions of the world."⁸ In a similar manner, interweaving language and imagery rich in texture, Dia's animation has a touch of baroquism.

Echoing previous works by the artist (Blood Sun, 2022; Long Live the New Fle$h, 2020), the animation created for this exhibition features a single-computer generated protagonist with female bodily attributes.

As viewers, we are constantly brought to acknowledge the protagonist's discernible materiality. Whether gently touching the water, caressing the land or fur, and sensing the marks of incision on a rubber tree, the protagonist evokes, in the worlds of cultural theorist Laura U. Marks, an experience of haptic visuality.⁹ Marks defines this form of perception as a tactile mode of looking, a way in which the eyes use the organs of touch. The sense of haptic in the artist's animation is amplified by her relinquishment of a linear perspective and resistance to depth vision to which Western's modern traditions of representation are tied. Besides, the interactions between her protagonist and the environmental enhance the haptic sensibility in the artist's work. Transferring the ritual drawing of kola that traditionally marks the thresholds of homes or the margins of the streets onto the body, the artist continuously strives to dissolve the boundaries between body and environment. This spatial merging is amplified in the architecture of the exhibition where enlarged hands on the wall guide, embrace, or entrap the viewers inside.

Dia’s work is defined by the consciousness that physical infrastructure underpins current technologies. None of the “algorithms, data, and cloud infrastructures” could exist without earth’s minerals that are essential to any electronic components, asserts the researcher Kate Crawford.¹⁰ Digital media relies on the convergence of natural resources, labor, and geopolitical power. It is the tension between immateriality and materiality that echoes in the exhibition. Computer-generated imagery (CGI) sits in a continuum with other materials, from screen-printed works on latex, sublimation fabric prints, to vinyl on walls and barren soil.

This is further attested by Dia’s appropriation of stock images of Malayan rubber plantations that one can easily excavate from search engines.

What is at stake in Dia's appropriation of stock photography? First, artists often employ existing images to address conventions of representation underpinning the production of racialized bodies and subjects. That's one pathway to highlight how different forms of cultural production, whether texts or images, have legitimized colonial action and perpetuated its ideology. The question of photographs' ownership cannot be disentangled from the subjects' rights. Have the laborers in Malaya's rubber plantations ever consented to be photographed? That's the key question to ask. While acts of appropriation might not restore the subject's rights to self-image, they intervene in a system of representation that remained comfortably untouched and unquestioned in its commodified form. Lastly, the relationship with colonial photography for colonized subjects and their heirs is not as straightforward. As violent as they are, these images are often the rare material traces accounting for the existence of people and communities that were otherwise deprived of means for self-representation.

When archives of colonial histories are filled with omissions, gaps, and prejudices, one has to acknowledge, in the words of the writer Saidiya Hartman, an impossibility.¹² The impossibility to know what has not been told, recorded or experienced. The challenge, asserts Hartman, is not to give voice to what remains untold, but rather to "imagine what cannot be verified". Combining mass-production techniques such as screenprinting in the treatment of digitized archival photography, with the worldbuilding and speculative capacities of CGI modeling, Forget Me, Forget Me Not posits that to resist forgetting, one needs to conjure new forms of telling.