VENUS AT HOME

Artist Usha Seejarim launched her new body of work, part of her solo touring museum and festival exhibition titled Venus at Home, at the 2012 Grahamstown National Arts Festival as part of the Main Visual Arts Programme.

In 2013 to 2014, the exhibition will tour to other venues such as the Durban Art Gallery and the North West University Gallery in Potchefstroom.

Venus at Home is an intensely personal project, in which the artist aims to explore the places she finds herself in and the various roles she undertakes.

"The trajectory of my work shows a fascination with the everyday,” explains Seejarim. “Subsequent works have used household and ordinary objects like toothbrushes, toothpaste tubes, bus tickets, soap bars, kwiklocks (plastic clips that close bread packet), earbuds, stoep polish and safety pins. The everyday features also in previous video works where the practice of daily activities has been explored. Works have been made about daily travel to work and back, washing dishes, mowing the lawn and making roti.”

Seejarim is a young woman of Indian descent whose experience is as a South African. Yet her artistic voice has been nurtured and informed by the rich heritage of her South African diasporic Indian environment and culture.