Body Politics - 2020

Hearts in Isolation exhibition, Expanding the Walls 2020

expandingthewalls.studiomuseum.org

What validates an identity? Memories? Family? Stories, recipes, language? How do you know who or what you are? Who decides that? In Body Politics, and throughout my time at the Studio Museum in Harlem’s program Expanding the Walls: Making Connections Between Photography, History, and Community, I have explored these questions.

My photography helps me make sense of things I struggle with. In Body Politics I, I grapple with how my relationship to my Indian culture. I can only speak English fluently, and can’t communicate easily with many of my family members. How does that disconnect between me and the people who live in the culture I only try to relate to manifest physically? How can you see it in the way I, versus my mother, wears a sari?

I have also been exploring my relationship with my Black family and my own identity as a Black person. Though I have so many things that connect me to my Jamaican heritage, I still feel removed from it because of how little I resemble my father’s side of the family. In Body Politics II, I use frame in my photographs about Blackness to focus on one message, meaning, or symbol for my identity. I am also, however, conscious of how stereotyped my idea of Blackness is, and how those stereotypes are the only way I relate to my own Blackness.

These two identity struggles come to a head in my four-image series, Body Politics. The contrast between the questions I ask about my Indian identity — which are internal and emotional — and the questions I ask about my Black identity — which are physical and material — shows through these images. My art shows not the answer to my questions about myself but the path I am taking towards those answers (which, more often than not, result in more questions).