Zenaéca Singh

Artist Catalogue

Virtual Exhibition

Tracing the Home

Integral to my practice is the power of the archive with a focused interest in the history and futurity of South African Indians. I have been interrogating the politics of my identity and ancestry of the indentureship of Indians in South Africa. I have found that archives of South African Indians are largely state produced and are subjected to misrepresentations or a lack thereof. Stereotypes emerge and subsequently homogenise the diversity of the ethnic community. My conducted research also observes that state-produced texts deploy the ‘model minority’ trope that implies the upward mobility of Indians in South Africa upon their ‘opportunity’ of indentureship. This narrative is evident in the Department of Information’s The Indian South African (1975). It is a ninety paged report containing extreme propaganda to avert claims of the apartheid state being unjust and discriminative in reporting the aided advancements of Indians in South Africa. In addition to this, the imagery includes Oriental shops for food, bazaars and clothing, along with snapshots of the then-thriving centres like Oriental Plaza in Fordsburg, Johannesburg and Grey Street in Durban. Images of workers are also shown, predominantly in white and blue collar jobs as well as men in higher positions, whilst Indian women appear in sarees. Educational facilities like secondary and tertiary schools are also included alongside homes of the middle class. As a result, it erased the racialised and gendered realities of the working class and poor. I am therefore interested in subverting these implications while working through my positionality as a ‘born-free’ South African.

Whilst The Indian South African (1975) has prompted my project, scholarly texts become useful to argue the impact and inaccuracy of such a document as this has had. Notably, South African Indian scholars have begun to re-write the visual history of the community in highlighting the working class struggle through research, sociological studies and photographic documentations (Fatima Meer (1969); Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie (2000); Riason Naidoo (2008); Devi Rajab & Ranjith Kally (2011). I thereby seek to contribute to this emerging body of work in my artistic practice.

I am drawn to the narratives of choice in the discourses of migration and belonging and the broader and relational aspects of labour politics. The site of the ‘home’ holds great value to my practice and interrogation as it is a deeply contested site in the South African history of land dispossession and its subsequent issues of access that has left many physically and economically displaced. I also found critical the lack of a home for the indentured Indians in relation to my present sense of the home. The Homescapes installation emerges out of this interest and becomes an imaginative work to contemplate and speculate the fragments of my past, present and future. The domestic objects and materials used to build homes are prompted by the (im)possibilities of home-making and self-making for The South African Indian. The ships and sugar become signifiers for the dispensation of indentureship and become bitter-sweet reminders and confrontations with this sugar-coated history. The family photos become a powerful symbol of futurity and desire against this history. In presenting the ships and sugar in varied moments of the home space, like the kitchen or display cabinet, it suggests the permeations of colonialism within our every day while the Homescapes and family photos visualise aspects of the lived experience within the home space – of which remain missing in available archives.