Usha Seejarim 'Forms in Transit' at the NSA
by Virginia MacKenny
Usha Seejarim's current show at the NSA promised much. Funded by lottery money raised by the NSA, and taking up the entire gallery, it presents both a mini retrospective (for those in the province unfamiliar with her work), as well as more recent work produced from her stay in New York, courtesy the Ampersand Foundation.
Including the four projector workTwo Rooms and a Kitchen, submitted for her Vita nomination last year, 'Forms in Transit' has a premise that is interesting and worthy of investigation. Her emphasis on the South African Indian community, a neglected subject, seen from the inside and therefore resisting the process of exoticisation is highly pertinent in the context of Durban, a city with the highest Indian population in world outside India.
Proposing to explore the new routes, and roots, created by the daily journeying enforced on anyone not privileged to be white during the apartheid years, and given that Seejarim's starting point is her own historical and geographical location of Lenasia, the exhibition has the potential to be a fascinating and personalised exposure.
However, the show largely fails to deliver. The lower main gallery is the site of blown-up photographs of road markings - the most interesting aspect of which is that they are indicators of motion frozen onto the tar. Given Seejarim's recent intercontinental travels one might speculate which motifs are from other countries but one is not given any clues. The banality of the images reinforces rather than engages the generic language of official signage.
On the floor are small drawings of ships, reminiscent of the signs found in the harbour, arranged on a grid. They are Seejarim's response to the gallery's request to do a site-specific work for Durban. Placed near the gallery walls they appear like an afterthought; less interesting than the chalk drawings of many street artists. They feel too small, marginalized in terms of placing and predictable in terms of visual imagery. The small purple crab, also drawn on the stairwell, apparently seen early on in Seejarim's Durban sojourn, does not encourage the viewer to take this particular project seriously.
Upstairs in the mezzanine a greater sense of engagement is felt in the rubbings on paper from the streets of New York. They give a sense of immediacy to the transferral of place, the traces and tracing of another city lifted into our own space, but one feels the need for more than this technique, often first taught at kindergarten, to engage the complexities of metropolitan demarcation.
Possibly the most satisfying works are the sound pieces. Set in different spots in the gallery they contain sounds from the cities of New York, Cape Town and Lenasia respectively. The listener, attempting to identify the differences between the cities, is caught between the generic sound of a city and its specificity. One may also ponder that New York is as familiar to us as Cape Town simply because of the amount of American media to which we have been exposed.
Given the NSA's effort to facilitate the show at every level, this seems like an under-utilised opportunity. One wonders whether a level of complacency is not penetrating Seejarim's output.
Opens: 6pm, July 29
Closes: 17 August
NSA Gallery, 166 Bulwer Road, Glenwood
Tel: 031 202 3686
Fax: 031 202 3744
Email: iartnsa@mweb.co.za
Website: www.nsagallery.co.za
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