Persistent Visions | Erika Tan

One of the most challenging exhibitions in terms of creating context. Much of the complexities emerged from the very rich nature of the work itself. Persistent Visions as an artwork, seems so relevant to pretty much most of my curatorial practice. The Museum space mediated through the very recurrence of colonial imagery; bare and undefined, yet so potent in terms of its relevance. Excerpt from the catalogue is below:

Shabbir Hussain Mustafa: The filmic representations in the three-screen installation range from different parts of the non-West and are based on ‘amateur footage’, i.e. films made by individuals and families of their experiences in terms of working and living in particular parts of the British Raj during the 20^th Century. These are, in many ways, personal images, now placed in a public and more so importantly post-Empire archive.  As one encounters (in triptych) visuals of Oriental bodies juxtaposed to the colonizing representatives presence in alien and exotic realms (as silent burqa-clad females of British India scatter across the screen, followed by fleeting images of the Colonial masters basking at the beaches on a sunny afternoon being served by their native servants in the backdrop) one begins to wonder about the different complexities that you may have encountered in terms of navigating between content and the peculiar form and context that these representations potentiate...?

Erika Tan: I think, what is great about this opening question is the way in which it reflects how your mind’s eye has been imprinted with particular images and in particular specific pairings that do not necessarily recreate the relations made in my edits but are specific to you, your interests and your indignations. This Shabbir Hussain Mustafa-time-space-collapse reflects the process of your viewing and the indelible affect of empire on your/our interpretive framework. Just as certain images persist in our memories, so too are we reminded of the insidious persistency and continuing potency of colonial perceptions, theories, and practices.

Not to over-state or fall into the trap of glamorizing the Derrida-esque ‘mal d’archive’, Steadmans’ ‘dust’ or the various accounts of relational toiling in Burtons Archive Stories research trope, but my experience within the archive was charged and transformative. From the train journeys to the archive, the convoluted physical access to the archive offices, the smell of the place, encountering the actual material, watching hours of silent footage often in fast-forward, aware of my limited time vis-à-vis the hours of footage left on the shelf remaining to be watched, being out of my depth, ‘discovering’ ‘hidden’ ‘secrets’, finding systems to remember what had been watched and what might be interesting to use for the work; and eventually leaving the physical structure of the archive, tired, grubby, head aching from too much screen time only to find that images continued to play and replay, creating loops of nostalgia, indignation, shock, delight, recognition, and even alienation. Persistent Visions is in a way my own personal compilation of images that stuck.

As you rightly point out in your question, there is in this archive, perhaps in the work itself, a tension between the specifics of personal and private; the geographic and historically located; and that of a more public or generic grand narrative of Empire and posthumous or postcolonial understandings, recognition, acknowledgement – or critique. A very important point for me is the context that I found this material in. The moving image archives are among a series of archives (oral history, picture archive and moving-image archive) housed and serving the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum. One initially encounters some of the material through the themes and storylines within the museum, which tell the story, primarily from a British perspective of Britain’s imperial history and the development of a common wealth of nations.  Alongside commentary on the discrepancies of power and treatment of colonized peoples, there are also sections on life in British India, how the indigenous elite took up new cultural forms such as dress and sports, the laying of cable across oceans and how the British took telecommunications to other continents, the mapping of Tibet despite surveyors being prohibited, and finally in the last section, The End of Empire: The Commonwealth Comes To Britain, the story is of how the empire has impacted ‘at home’ in Britain and on its current population and multi-ethnic make-up. As I remember, it’s a fairly upbeat account how British culture has benefited (and continued to) from these incoming influences from previous colonies.

For the full version please see: Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, “Persistent Visions | In Dialogue with Erika Tan” in Persistent Visions | Erika Tan, Singapore: NUS Museum, 2009.

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