Standing alone

Artists Mariah Lookman and Shanaathanan envision Non Aligned as a group-show of works by Vaidehi Raja, Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan, Muhanned Cader, Mariah Lookman, Lala Rukh and Ieuan Weinman.

The title Non Aligned takes its inspiration from political movements against imperialism, neo colonialism, domination and military aggression.

This exhibition aims to create a space to reflect on new approaches that set to question the appearance of fixed identities in the post-post colonial context.

For the exhibition Non Aligned the artists will come together with practices interested in interrogating that which borders closely, yet never quite sits comfortably to be just one thing or the other.

This exhibition in making is the opportunity to explore the diverse composition of all that is to be individual by paying attention to what is distinct.

Vaidehi Raja is a printmaker. Her work addresses notions of identity by revealing the tensions between that of being, belonging and homeland. Her work is the means to talk about the phase of being always in a kind of “transition”, whereby the self of which is at the same time ancient, and yet marginal and pushed to the peripheral. For Non Aligned Raja proposes to make a series of prints inline with her ongoing artistic interests.

T. Shanaathanan makes work in mixed media and installation. Shananathanan’s artistic oeuvre explicitly confronts the impact of the Sri Lankan civil war on the individual. His work is specially focused to give a voice/face to the ravages endured by the minorities. For Non Aligned Shanaathanan intends to look into the practice of cartography in order to expose the arbitrariness of lines on paper, which are thereafter used to fracture or join up people. Further still the work will be a means to explore an alternative account of geography. This will be a kind of mapping which is linked to the environs, a mapping that considers geography as history, and shows how maps can amount to the making or unmaking of peoples and cultures. For this series of works Shanathanan proposes to ‘stitch up maps’ using techniques that span from drawing, weaving, printing and projecting

Muhanned Cader makes drawings and paintings infused with satire and irony to address the political in the everyday. The reframing of the pictorial frame is an ongoing concern in all of Cader’s work. This can be the landscape, the figure, and political events, all, which he subverts to reveal a view, which aims to unsettled expected viewpoints. An avid drawer, Cader works in series where multiple drawings come together to make composite works, drawing as a means to astutely capture what is sad and humorous in any position. For Non Aligned Cader proposes to make detailed drawings of what is generally considered debris. These drawings are the artist’s way to resonate with that, which is dismissed in the aftermath, overlooked and even forgotten.

Mariah Lookman makes video installations and large-scale drawings on paper. She uses drawing as a form of image making that corresponds to meditation and observation. The process of drawing is important in all her work; process by which a sense of time comes to be embodied in the works is essential. Her drawings address the complexity of what it means to know or see as challenged by new media technologies as they link past with the present. The drawings are also a way to look at life seeing past the realm of appearances, which are to do with fixed identities or determinations. For Non Aligned Lookman proposes to make collages out of ripped images from online newspapers together with a video installation.

Lala Rukh is a feminist activist artist from Pakistan. Lala Rukh’s drawings and photographic works are considered to be amongst the pioneering works of the South Asian minimalist tradition. These drawings are inspired directly from an observation of nature and in particular could be best described as meditations on the horizon line.

The use of the horizon line in the drawings is a way to bring to the fore the binding relationship of the body to history and landscape. For Non Aligned Lala Rukh will return to Sri Lanka and once again look at the nature of landscape as a means to negotiate what is shifting and yet focus on what remains the same.

Ieuan Weinman makes large-scale multi-media installations. He creates paintings, drawings, videos and constructions to interrelate and describe various fields of information surrounding the transferral of images inter-culturally. Usually the images relate to a place or event that originates from Sri Lanka the country of Weinman’s origin. He creates environments that are illustrative of certain places and situations and from these points creates dissonances; using performative video, imagery described through a variety of painting styles, materials and environments. Weinman uses painting as a deconstructed object within these environments. For Non Aligned Weinman will continue the exploration of focusing on select images and repeating them as seen in the show of 2010 at Rearview Gallery Melbourne called Smoke and Fragments. For the show he painted a series of images whose imagery was culled from the media about the end of the SL war. He gave the audience the opportunity to ‘hang’ the show or assert their preference for ordering the final arrangement of the work and create the environment it was hung.