Cheyenne Kemraj

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ARTIST CATALOGUE

The Miscellaneous Adventures of the Tiger's Daughter

This body of work deals with the notions of Indofuturism, speculative fiction, post-colonial identity, and magical realism. This is done through the portrayal of an original character and how she navigates this world as well as other realms. This is done through various oil paintings, mainly figurative and portraiture, placed in a non-linear fragmented narrative. The girl -who is yet to be named- is a magical girl, who holds powers that she uses to help people. She shares physical similarities to myself, as she is a part of me but also her own entity. This is inspired by the Japanese magical girl genre mahō shōjo, as the likes of Sailor Moon, the Winx, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and so on. 

Over time she starts to wrestle with the weight of the injustices of the world and slowly starts to see herself struggling to distinguish what is right. The magical girl holds the post-colonial burden of rebuilding identity, nationhood, and culture -and what that means to her in the wake of systemic destruction or exploitation. The ‘antagonist’ of the world is depicted as a morally ambiguous tiger, the national animal of India. The tiger acts as both a monster and as something the magical girl cannot escape becoming. This relationship becomes an analogy for the struggle with post-colonial identity felt by most people of colour. In post-colonial theory, identity is frequently seen as fragmented or hybrid — colonized subjects must negotiate between imposed colonial identities and indigenous or personal ones. 

The magical girl's transformation can mirror this, as slowly she becomes the tiger and vice versa. The magical girl being a shapeshifter is able to experience and confront these forms of oppression, and gains empathy and wisdom albeit through internalising their effects, and her constant struggle against the tiger alludes to all oppressed groups to withstand defining themselves or being defined by colonialism. Additionally, amongst the paintings are various objects and tape writings. The objects included are real life renditions that can be seen in the paintings. The tape writings are thoughts, sentences, conversations between myself and my girl, as while I’m making these pieces, she is revealing herself and her story to me. The magical girl is in constant conversation with the worlds around her, within the parameters of the paintings and outside of them. 

My work makes use of this by utilising the narrative as a tactic to highlight the differences between identity of ones own culture and national identity, with that of the identity imposed by colonialism. There is one reoccurring colour that I feel encapsulates the essence of my work. Pantone #C6057B, a bright magenta. Magenta does not have a corresponding wavelength on the visible light spectrum, instead our brains create the colour as blue and red-light stimulant –with the omission of green light. It only seems fitting that a colour that technically does not exist is a vehicle for my magical worlds.