Photo Credit: Remi Chauvin
Reverse Erosions
'When I asked my Tamil family why they do those actions with their hands at the temple, they said that they don’t know, “It’s just what we do.”'
Georgia Ahalia Morgan has spent two months in residence at Visual Bulk. 'Reverse Erosions / தலைகீழ் அரிப்பு' will present work resulting from this residency and Georgia's ongoing research surrounding the entanglement of identity with place and culture.
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Ella Shoat and Robert Stam identified “aesthetics of garbage” as one of a range of alternative revalorisations which invert what has formally been seen as negative, especially within colonial discourse.
Materiality, or an interest in hierarchies of materials, heavily informs Georgia's practice. In her work, the blending of ‘high’ and ‘low’ and the subsequent aesthetic contradictions that occur when using materials in this way, are synonymous with India as a place and culture. The Hindu act of puja combined with the amount of the population that live in poverty, have created a culture of adorning everything with anything. Where material and aesthetic mashing was born out of necessity in India, over the past two decades, working with ‘trash’ has become increasingly fashionable in the Western World. The drastically different relationships that the West and India have to materials, is played out in Georgia's work, a mashing of aesthetics which speaks to place and the politics of location.
“Histories, discourses and narratives of trash are multiple – from its association with transgression and dissent, to its appropriation as souvenir ‘kitsch’ - but, importantly, its histories are no longer marginal or secret.” - Gillian Waitelex