Sarindar Dhaliwal

You can learn a lot about Sarindar Dhaliwal without ever meeting her. In “Record Keeping,” a survey of works from 1989 to 2003, the personal and political concerns of the artist are presented in 11 mixed-media paintings and installations. Dhaliwal was born in the Punjab in northern India, lived in England as a young child, then moved to Canada, where she now lives. Rooted in her experiences over three continents, her art has a visual cohesiveness that, together with her thematic consistency, results in a distinct aesthetic identity.

In large paintings on paper, Sarindar Dhaliwal juxtaposes images and sometimes texts, square and rectangular in shape, giving the effect of a collage of cut-outs, arranged in a loose grid. In Peonies II, from 1997, happy memories and visions of natural beauty are juxtaposed with harsher realities and sombre tones, a dichotomy that produces an edge of tension to counterbalance the sensuous aspects of the work. One text is an anecdote illustrating the sometimes uneasy existence of English Sikhs, whose desire to celebrate their history in that country is regarded by the established population as an intrusion. An envelope and collaged postage stamps hint at friends and family far from England, signified by names of bodies of water written along the border of this many-layered work. Another text describes the artist’s re-encounter with bursting peony buds and spring grass, remembered fondly from her childhood. Flowers are a recurring motif in Dhaliwal’s paintings, appearing as lush bouquets or worked into ornamental borders that act as structural elements. The vivid blossoms of cultivated flowers represent the radiant allure of nature, but also the ordering human hand, breeding and planting species to suit desire. A section of gold leaf behind a spray of roses further alludes to human artifice and also recalls the use of gold backgrounds in European mediaeval book illuminations and Indian miniature paintings. The influence of the latter emerges in Dhaliwal’s predilection for intense colour, images framed in small rectangles and the use of ornament. By integrating aspects of these elements into her non-traditional framework, the artist arrives at a synthesis that incorporates both her Indian heritage and her Western-based training as a contemporary artist.

Themes of migration, the role of language and natural beauty filtered through the human eye surface in the painting Dutch/English Lessons for Donald Evans and Me, 1989. In ten squares depicting fruits in the manner of botanical illustrations, the artist uses watercolour to capture subtle transitions of colour. But Dhaliwal interrupts visual splendour by placing, down the centre, three black squares containing a list of English names of pigments and Dutch names of fruits, written in an elegant script such as might appear on the blackboard of a Victorian schoolroom. Fragments of maps of Dutch and English cities refer to the relocation that necessitates language lessons.

The blackboard appears again in Punjabi Sheets #3: Birbansian, 1953, one of the five installations on view. Colour and order predominate, but in a more spartan setting than in the paintings. In blood red script, the artist recounts the story of two sisters, whose final hope in saving an ailing child lies in a peasant ritual involving the crushing of an egg. The transcript ends before the story’s conclusion, leaving us in a state of suspense akin to what the despairing women must have felt. On a ledge below the text, a series of eggs in descending size alludes to birth and the preciousness of each life, regardless of stature.

With fewer visual clues pointing to their meaning, several of the installations are intriguing puzzles. The preservation of information is the theme of the book of yellow, a set of four large books bound in shades of the colour and stamped on the spines with words connoting different yellows. The artist sites the concept of an ultimate library as the receptacle for these volumes, which would contain a record of all the events, thoughts and actions that ever happened. The pages, made of handmade paper, are blank, leaving us to guess at their significance. They may, perhaps, contain those ideas that cannot be expressed in words. The books are placed on desks supplied by the host gallery. In this case, the choice was fortuitous, as Queen’s University owns a desk formerly belonging to Sir John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor General of Canada, 1935– 1940. So Canada’s own colonial past is brought into play.

The largest piece in the show, curtains for babel x, y & z, is, at first viewing, both engaging and enigmatic. Fifty-six pairs of brightly coloured curtains are installed on a blackboard in four horizontal rows. Below every pair, written in chalk in the author’s calligraphic hand, is the name of a country or city. The curtains in the top row are closed. The others are open, each revealing a word inscribed vertically in an unfamiliar tongue. Without the aid of further explanation, we are as unenlightened as the rebellious denizens of the biblical Babel, whose common language was transformed into many different ones by a god angered by their united challenge to heaven. With the benefit of the exhibition catalogue, we discover that the mysterious words are names of endangered languages from each of the places listed. Dhaliwal turns the table on the belief that monoculture is desirable, instead celebrating diversity and mourning its gradual passing. From personal experiences to issues of global import, as artist, immigrant and woman, Dhaliwal tackles whatever arouses her passion, curiosity or ire and uses her considerable talents to engineer a balance between often opposing forces. ■

“Sarindar Dhaliwal: Record Keeping” is a touring exhibition jointly curated by OVA (Organization for Visual Arts, London) in collaboration with the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton and the Agnes Etherington Centre in Kingston. Upcoming tour dates are Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, Halifax, January 14 to March 5, 2006, and Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, December 8, 2006, to February 17, 2007.

Barbara Isherwood is a Toronto-based writer.