(Self-portrait of Usha Seejarim, taken from
her website)
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.
"As a
home-maker/housewife/mother of two, and an artist, I seem to straddle between
daily chores like washing the dishes or changing diapers to the seemingly
glamorous act of making art. These two distinctly female roles in my own life
are coming together in this body of work that uses ordinary household objects
as materials to create a series of sculptures and installations", says
Seejarim. Her work explores issues of identity with a fascination for the
mundane and the ordinary. This new body of work will extend Seejarim's previous
preoccupation with the 'ordinary' and will explore her position in her various
persona and roles - that of an Indian/South African woman, wife, mother, home
keeper and artist.
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.
Each object is
culturally loaded, gender specific and striped of its utilitarian function as
it is transformed into art matter. She links this to an acute awareness of her
identity through location, history and culture. its a sense of who she is
in relation to notions of home and belonging.
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